equinoctinal

English

Alternative forms

• equinoctinall (obsolete)

Adjective

equinoctinal (not comparable)

1. Synonym of equinoctial
   • 1833 March 5, “The Months: March”, in The Weekly Visitor, number 11, page 86:

     The equinoctinal gales are often ministers of vengeance, scattering desolation on sea and land.

   • 1840, Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, page 100:

     Since solar and sidereal time are estimated from the passage of the sun and the equinoctial point across the meridian of each place, the hours are different at different places: while it is one o'clock at one place it is two at another, three at another, &c.;

   • 1906, Shoe Retailer and Boots and Shoes Weekly - Volume 59, page 27:

     The heavy rains due usually in September, and popularly designated as the equinoctinal storms, almost always create an early demand for light rubbers, and in many shoe stores these goods, especially in women's and children's styles, are already in evidence.

   • 1996, Richard T. Couture, The Gresham Papers: What Think You of That?, page 318:

     Then Clara and Mr. Taylor set out with bag and baggage, but I've heard since, Clara and himself had to return to Mr. Campbell's about nine o'clock finding all the bridges in the country washed away by the late equinoctinal storm, which raged from Thursday mid-day until Saturday evening with intense severity.

Noun

equinoctinal

1. The celestial equator.
   • 1768, Oliver Goldsmith, The Present State of the British Empire in Europe, America, Africa and Asia., page 276:

     I intend to consider the English colonies under two principal divisions; the first I allot to those islands which lie under the torrid zone between the tropic of Cancer and the Equinoctinal line, in that part generally called the West-Indies.

   • 1770, James Atkinson, William Mountaine, Epitome of the Art of Navigation, page 171:

     1. With a Pair of Compasses take the nearest Distance from the Sun's Place in the Ecliptic 29d. in ϒs, to the Equinoctial on the Globe, 2. Measure that Distance on the Equinoctinal Colure (if graduated) and it sheweth the Declination 20d.20m. as before.

   • 1777, William Robertson, The History of America - Volume 1, page 136:

     As he was fully persuaded that the fertile regions of India lay to the south-west of those countries which he had discovered, he proposed, as the most certain method of finding out these, to stand directly south from the Canary or Cape de Verd Islands, until he came under the equinoctinal line, and then to stretch to the west before the favourable wind for such a course , which blows invariably between the tropics.

   • 1835, Gilbert Thomas Burnett, Outlines of Botany, etc - Volume 2, page 1059:

     Of the Heliotropidæ, which are separated into several districts, the Cordieæ and Ehretieæ have an exclusively tropical range, being found in both hemispheres, but only within the torrid zone; and the Heliotropieæ, although not strictly equinoctinal plants, are rarely found without the tropics, except in the hotter parts of the temperate zones.

   • 1867, Ferd. Mueller, “Characteristic of an undescribed Senecio, from South Africa”, in Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria, page 38:

     The genus Senecio is not merely more widely distributed over the globe than any other existing, from the polar to the equinoctinal regions of both hemispheres ( though almost absent in North Australia ), but it embraces also more species than any other, nearly a thousand being on record, some however but ill defined.