great circle
1
5.8
- noun
- /ɡreɪt ˈsɜr.kəl/
- Specialized
:
círculo máximo
- The geometry of a sphere starts with great circles and talks about spherical distances, spherical angles, your triangles, polar triangles.
Examples
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Great-circle routes radiating from the home base appear as straight lines in the airline's cartographic advertisements (Economist, 6 March 1971).
Academic text (1991) -
According to Weisstein (1999), the great circle distance is the shortest surface arc between two points on a sphere.
Academic text (2002) -
And at that point now it becomes in to the great circle route for ships between say, New York and and England.
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To assess distance traveled, the great circle distance between cities where sequential games were played was calculated.
Academic text (2002) -
Distance is measured using the great circle method, while the border variable equals zero if cities i and j are in the same country and equals one if the cities are in different countries.
Academic text (2005) -
In simplest terms, the word meridian refers to the great circle we imagine around the Earth, connecting the North and South Poles.
Blog text (18) -
A great circle was marked on the turf, surrounded by a curving ditch enclosing a region fifty paces across.
Fiction book (1994) -
For these calculations, pairwise distances between all cells were computed with Vincenty's great-circle algorithm on a WGS-84 ellipsoid.
Academic text (2012) -
The plane had taken off 3 hours earlier, climbing from Rio de Janeiro on a northeast heading, its navigation computers hewing to a great circle route that would take the flight 5,680 miles to Paris.
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To assess distance traveled, the great circle distance between cities where sequential games were played was calculated.
Surface Forms
Morphology
A B1 learner who knows 'great' as 'very large' and 'circle' as a round shape will likely infer 'a very large circle', so there is a clear compositional link. However, the precise, technical sense (the circle produced by a plane through the sphere's center — i.e. the largest possible circle on a sphere) is a specialized geometric meaning that is not fully predictable from the everyday senses of the parts, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
The term great circle comes from the simple image of cutting a ball straight through the middle so the cut makes the biggest possible circle around it. That's why the equator is a great circle, and why airplanes follow a great circle route — it gives the 'shortest distance' between two points on Earth.