armillary sphere
- noun
- /ˈɛrməˌlɛri sfɪr/
- Specialized
:
esfera armilar
- They may have used rudimentary instruments, such as crossed sticks to chart position, but they lacked the armillary spheres or sextants of other civilizations.
Examples
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"These armillary spheres and orreries may have come to his attention during visits to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where Calder was born and where he spent many of his childhood years.
Academic text (1998) -
It depicts an armillary sphere used by this famous Danish astronomer at his observatory, Uraniborg.
Academic text (2005) -
The clock is a tower topped by an armillary sphere and celestial globe of mechanical and hydraulic engineering, about thirty-five feet high (Fig. 11).
Academic text (2002) -
For the first number of Abstraction-Creation, Art Non Figuratif in 1932, Calder prepared a statement to accompany a reproduction of Little Universe, an open wire orb resembling an armillary sphere:
Academic text (1998) -
The teacher used an armillary sphere to explain the movement of the stars and planets.
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In the garden, an armillary sphere stands as a beautiful representation of celestial navigation.
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The museum's exhibit included an armillary sphere, showing how ancient astronomers tracked the heavens.
Synonyms
A metal set of hoops that shows where stars are in the sky
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a specialized, historical astronomical term whose overall meaning (a framework of rings representing celestial features) is not transparently derived from its parts for a B1 learner. While 'sphere' signals a round shape, 'armillary' is rare and not semantically decomposable or informative to learners without technical knowledge, so the compound’s referent is not predictable from the constituents.
Etymology
Armillary sphere comes from the picture of many metal 'rings' like bracelets around a round ball, because armillary refers to a ring and sphere means a ball. So, it became the name for 'a model of the sky made of rings' used to show how the stars move.
