obliquity
English
Etymology
From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Middle French obliquité, from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Latin obliquitas, from obliquus (“oblique”).
Pronunciation
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Noun
obliquity (countable and uncountable, plural obliquities)
- The quality of being oblique in direction, deviating from the horizontal or vertical; or the angle created by such a deviation. [from 15th c.]
- 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, lines 766-769:
- The Planet Earth, so stedfast though she seem, / Insensibly three different Motions move? / Which else to several Sphears thou must ascribe, / Mov'd contrarie with thwart obliquities
- 1851, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 9
- Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.
- 1897, Henry James, What Maisie Knew:
- She wore glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with antiquity.
- 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, lines 766-769:
- (astronomy, by extension, of a planet) Axial tilt.
- Mental or moral deviation or perversity; immorality. [from 15th c.]
- 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Chapter 2:
- Habitually living with the elements and knowing little more of the land than as a beach, or, rather, that portion of the terraqueous globe providentially set apart for dance-houses, doxies and tapsters, in short what sailors call a "fiddlers'-green," his simple nature remained unsophisticated by those moral obliquities which are not in every case incompatible with that manufacturable thing known as respectability.
- 2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage 2007, p. 404:
- Stray's [friends], apt to keep more to the shadows, tended to be practitioners of obliquity—as it quite often came down to, varieties of pimp.
- 1924, Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Chapter 2:
- The quality of being obscure, oftentimes willfully, sometimes as an exercise in euphemism. [from 17th c.]
- 1879, Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Chapter 25:
- That spiked my gun. I could not say anything. I was entirely out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie, and that I would not do; so I simply sat still and suffered, -- sat mutely and resignedly there, and sizzled, -- for I was being slowly fried to death in my own blushes.
- 1879, Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Chapter 25:
Translations
quality of being oblique
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(astronomy) axial tilt
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mental or moral deviation
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quality of being obscure — see obscurity