Definitions
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- noun Plural form of
colure .
Etymologies
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Examples
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Two of those -- the colures -- he alludes to in the following lines, when he describes the manner in which Satan, to avoid detection, compassed the Earth, after his discovery by Gabriel in Paradise, and his flight thence: --
The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' Thomas Nathaniel Orchard
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In all lands the Sun was known under various names, typical of solar energy, especially in reference to the equinoctial and solstitial colures.
The light of Egypt; or, The science of the soul and the stars 1900
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It is very probable that the Chaldeans may have made spheres, like the armillary sphere, for representing the poles of the heavens; and with rings to show the ecliptic and zodiac, as well as the equinoctial and solstitial colures; but we have no record.
History of Astronomy George Forbes 1892
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Sun.reached the Pleiades, in Taurus, announced the commencement of the annual revolution of the Sun. The intersection of the Zodiac by the colures at the Equinoctial and
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Albert Pike 1850
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The earth is too small, the circles too large and too numerous, some of them, the colures, for instance, are quite useless, and the thickness of the pasteboard gives them an appearance of solidity so that they are taken for circular masses having a real existence, and when you tell the child that these are imaginary circles, he does not know what he is looking at and is none the wiser.
Emile Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1745
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So as (notwithstanding all their former pretences & fair colures) they whose eyes God had not justly blinded might easily see wherto these things tended.
Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' From the Original Manuscript. With a Report of the Proceedings Incident to the Return of the Manuscript to Massachusetts William Bradford 1623
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So as (notwithstanding all their former pre - tences & fair colures) they whose eyes God had not justly blinded might easily see wherto these things tended.
chained_bear commented on the word colures
"COLURES, in astronomy and geography, are two great circles supposed to intersect each other at right angles in the poles of the world, and to pass through the solstitial and equinoctial points of the ecliptic.
"That which passes through the two equinoctial points, is called the equinoctial colure, and determines the equinoxes; and the other which passes through the poles of the ecliptic is called the solstitial colure, because it determines the solstices. By thus dividing the ecliptic into four equal parts, they mark the four seasons, or quarters of the year."
—Falconer's New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1816), 95
October 12, 2008