PRECESSION • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Precession

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/prisˈɛʃən/ Listen

Precession

noun

The motion of a spinning body (as a top) in which it wobbles so that the axis of rotation sweeps out a cone.

The act of preceding in time or order or rank (as in a ceremony). Synonyms: precedence, precedency.

See images of 'Precession'

Etymology of 'Precession'

Related search:

precession of the equinoxes

Share |

"Precession" Quotes from Famous Books

... aggression, and to avert the outbreak of a devastating war to which he saw Europe doomed. It may be wearisome to read the record. Yet it is the chronicle of Christendom during one of the most important and fateful epochs of modern history. No man can thoroughly understand the complication and precession of phenomena attending the disastrous dawn of the renewed war, on an even more awful scale than the original conflict in the Netherlands, without studying the correspondence of Barneveld. The history of Europe is there. The fate of Christendom is there. The conflict of elements, the ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... planet itself through geological periods which antedated the advent of man, or with more recent events, current narrations of which have been distorted by careless or perverse historians. The memory of Nature is infallibly accurate and inexhaustibly minute. A time will come as certainly as the precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method of historical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case of all original work. People among us who are capable of exercising astral clairvoyance in full perfection—but have not yet been called away to higher functions ...

— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... vacation at the seaside, while they were undergraduates of Cambridge University. They had spent all their time, to the surprise of onlookers, in spinning rounded stones on the beach, their object being to obtain a practical solution of the mathematical problem of "precession." ...

— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... a decrease, so that after the lapse of becoming periods the original state of things is restored. Such periodic phenomena abound in astronomy. There is the annual fluctuation of the seasons; there is the eighteen or nineteen year period of the moon; there is the great period of the precession of the equinoxes, amounting to twenty-six thousand years; and then there is the stupendous Annus Magnus of hundreds of thousands of years, during which the earth's orbit itself breathes in and out in response to the attraction of the planets. ...

— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

Words linked to "Precession" : motion, activity, precedency, precede, precedence