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Ellipse   /ɪlˈɪps/   Listen
Ellipse

noun
1.
A closed plane curve resulting from the intersection of a circular cone and a plane cutting completely through it.  Synonym: oval.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Ellipse" Quotes from Famous Books



... rundle, zone, belt, cordon, band; contrate wheel^, crown wheel; hub; nave; sash, girdle, cestus^, cincture, baldric, fillet, fascia, wreath, garland; crown, corona, coronet, chaplet, snood, necklace, collar; noose, lasso, lassoo^. ellipse, oval, ovule; ellipsoid, cycloid; epicycloid [Geom.], epicycle; semicircle; quadrant, sextant, sector. sphere &c 249. V. make round &c adj.; round. go round; encircle &c 227; describe a circle &c 311. Adj. round, rounded, circular, annular, orbicular; oval, ovate; elliptic, elliptical; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... consideration of dimensions goes up the chimney. In its standard ordinance for chimney construction, the National Board of Fire Underwriters calls for fireplace flues with a draft area of one-twelfth of that of the fireplace opening and determines this area as a circle or ellipse that will fit within the tile used to line the flue. As it is difficult to obtain flue linings of exactly the desired area, it is better to select a size slightly larger, rather than one smaller, and so make sure of sufficient capacity ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... [Greek: dia], through, [Greek: metron], measure), in geometry, a line passing through the centre of a circle or conic section and terminated by the curve; the "principal diameters" of the ellipse and hyperbola coincide with the "axes" and are at ... (continued in volume 8, slice 4, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... of "Porps! porps!" brought everything to a standstill. A large school of porpoises had just joined us, in their usual clownish fashion, rolling and tumbling around the bows as the old barky wallowed along, surrounded by a wide ellipse of snowy foam. All work was instantly suspended, and active preparations made for securing a few of these frolicsome fellows. A "block," or pulley, was hung out at the bowsprit end, a whale-line passed through it and "bent" (fastened) ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... intellectual love! what is this intellectual love? Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse—a pure metaphor, but a tragic metaphor. And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that saying that the heart also has its reasons. Reasons of the heart! loves of the head! intellectual delight! ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power of the Ancient Mariner could enable them ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... mind's eye hung masses of glossy black hair, waving along the brows and falling over the shoulders in curling clusters. Within this ebon framework were features to mock the sculptor's chisel. The mouth, with its delicate rose-coloured ellipse; the nose, with smooth straight outline, and small recurvant nostril; the arching brows of jet; the long fringes upon the eyelids; all were vividly before me, and all unlike the features of Eugenie Besancon. The colour of the skin, too—even that was different. It was not that Circassian white that ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... activity were evident enough upon the entire landscape. On the west side we had a horseshoe-shaped vertical wall—seemingly containing an extinct crater—and yet another on the north side of the western end of the elongated ellipse which was ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... low, with lofty towers at the corners, and one huge dome in the middle, rising from the roof to half the height of the towers. The main entrance was in the centre of the front—a low arch that seemed half an ellipse. No one was visible, the doors stood wide open, and I went unchallenged into a large hall, in the form of a longish ellipse. Toward one side stood a cage, in which couched, its head on its paws, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... refer to ethics, in that case there will be a strange change of subject in passing from quisquam to haec ipsa, both which expressions will be nominatives to poterit, further, there will be the almost impossible ellipse of ars, scientia, or something of the kind after haec ipsa. On every ground the reading of Madv. is insupportable. Quid, haec ipsa: I have added quid to fill up the lacuna left by Halm, who supposes much more to have fallen out. ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... consists of only half an ellipse, the southern half being replaced by the area H, which we have already described. It has a rectangular niche to the west containing a fine trilithon with a cover-slab nearly ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet

... turned a bend and saw in front of us a clear placid reach, on which the reds and purples were serenely dying, and at a distance of about half a mile, a fine bridge with the large central arch forming with its reflection in the water a perfect ellipse. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... talked in paradox and ellipse. He threw his sentences into air, and let them find their ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... made a second ascent with the same passengers as before, with the exception of the Duke. According to the report of the brothers Robert, they succeeded in completing an ellipse and then travelled further in the direction of the wind without using the oars or steering arrangements. They then deviated their course somewhat by the use of these implements and landed at Bethune, about 180 ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... second class, of those lines whose nature is to proceed for ever into space. Any portion of a circle, for instance, is, by the law of its being, compelled, if it continue its course, to return to the point from which it set out; so also any portion of the oval curve (called an ellipse), produced by cutting a cylinder obliquely across. And if a single point be marked on the rim of a carriage wheel, this point, as the wheel rolls along the road, will trace a curve in the air from one part of the road to another, which is called a cycloid, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... The resulting home ranges were polygonal figures. Haugen (1942) altered this method by drawing lines that connected points midway between the actual points of capture and the next outermost traps in the grid. Fitch (1947) used a method for enclosing all points of capture in a circle or ellipse that represented the home range boundaries and expressed home range as the diameter of these figures. Another method, which has been used to determine the home range of birds, is to map the movements of an individual as it is observed. Stebler (1939) suggested the use of tracking records ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes

... represent a plain surface as produced by the flowing of a right line. It will immediately be objected, that our idea of a surface is as independent of this method of forming a surface, as our idea of an ellipse is of that of a cone; that the idea of a right line is no more precise than that of a plain surface; that a right line may flow irregularly, and by that means form a figure quite different from a plane; and that therefore we must suppose it to flow along two right lines, parallel ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... that a weapon with a fission yield of 1 million tons TNT equivalent power (1 megaton) exploded at ground level in a 15 miles-per-hour wind would produce fallout in an ellipse extending hundreds of miles downwind from the burst point. At a distance of 20-25 miles downwind, a lethal radiation dose (600 rads) would be accumulated by a person who did not find shelter within 25 minutes after the time the fallout began. At a distance ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

... our will as the centre of our individuality, but we should do better to picture our individuality as an ellipse rather than a circle, a figure having two "conjugate foci," two equilibriated centres of revolution rather than a single one, one of which is the will-power or faculty of doing, and the other the consciousness or perception of being. If we realise only one of these ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... in with greater severity on account of the curvature at either end of the major axis of the ellipse being sharper than it is at the end of any diameter of the circle, the sectional areas, of ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn

... of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... est idem'), so here the simile fails, for there is nothing in our loves that corresponds to the cold north, or the declining west, which in two hemispheres must necessarily be supposed. But an ellipse of such length will scarcely rescue the line from the charge of nonsense or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... and likewise all the properties of figures. He is acute and He is obtuse, because He is at one and the same time all possible triangles; his radii are at once equal and unequal, because He is both the circle and the ellipse—and He is the hyperbola besides, which is an ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... flag is dark blue with a narrow red border on all four sides; centered is a red-bordered, pointed, vertical ellipse containing a beach scene, outrigger canoe with sail, and a palm tree with the word GUAM superimposed in bold red letters; US flag is the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... bodies as projected into space, and thus moving according to laws similar to that which governs the motion of a stone thrown from the hand. If two bodies alone were concerned, say the sun and a planet, the orbit of the lesser around the greater would be an ellipse, which would never change its form, size, or position. That the orbits of the planets and asteroids do change, and that they are not exact ellipses, is due to their attraction upon each other. The question is, do ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... all crowned my efforts, though I 'divided my swift mind,' now hither, now thither, in a way that I felt sure would have made AEneas green with envy: but the dimly-seen oval remained as provokingly blank as ever—a mere Ellipse, as if in some mathematical diagram, without even the Foci that might be made to do duty as a nose and a mouth. Gradually, however, the conviction came upon me that I could, by a certain concentration of thought, think the ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... Books in Greek and as to three more in Arabic, the eighth being lost. From Apollonius's prefaces we can judge of the relation of his work to Euclid's Conics, the content of which answered to the first three Books of Apollonius. Although Euclid knew that an ellipse could be otherwise produced, e. g. as an oblique section of a right cylinder, there is no doubt that he produced all three conics from right cones like his predecessors. Apollonius, however, obtains them in the most general way by cutting any oblique cone, and his original axes of reference, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... leave behind it a trail of light to mark its orbit, and our perceptions of form were sufficiently acute, we should see that these curves of light are not exact circles, but a little flattened into an ellipse, with the sun always in one of the foci. Hence each planet is nearer to the sun at one part of its orbit than another; that point is called the perihelion, and the farthest point aphelion. This eccentricity ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... seconds he heard another crack, and still another, which sent him into a hard gallop. As the horse quickened his pace, Kettle dropped the reins, and grasping Corporal around the neck, hung on desperately as the horse sped around the great ellipse. At a word from Sergeant Briggs, the horse stopped and walked sedately to the middle of the hall. Kettle slipped off and staggered ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell

... needles of metal holding the curious electric globes, while at regular intervals blue domes like gigantic azure bubbles interrupted the streets of square and colonnaded houses, that began around the amphitheatre, with pale saffron tones, and grew in intensity until the edges of the huge populous ellipse were laid like a deep orange rim upon the green country side. The light falling upon this reflected, refracted and dispersed, seemed to convert it into a liquid and faintly throbbing lake of color, cut up into segments by the dark lanes or ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... the tower, which rises in diminishing stages to the height of 260 feet and there ends in an embattled platform, account for the singularly feudal and fortress-like character of the building. The outline of the buttresses being that of a semi-ellipse, they look like turrets carried up the entire face of the wall. The floor of the church is many feet above the ground, and the entrance was originally protected by a drawbridge and portcullis; but these military works were removed in the sixteenth century, and in ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... the word to recommence the bombardment had been flashed round the circuit of the entrenchments, more than half the batteries had been put out of action. The twelve air-ships stationed at equal intervals round the vast ellipse, and discharging their No. 3 shell from their four guns ahead and astern, from an elevation of four thousand feet, had simultaneously wrecked half the batteries of the besiegers before their occupants had any clear idea of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith

... her own children who, while obeying the paternal influence of the fiery orb, are also obedient to the world that governs them. These secondary asters, or satellites, follow the planets in their course, and revolve round them in an ellipse, just as the others rotate round the Sun. Every one knows the satellite of the Earth, the Moon. All the other planets of our system have their own moons, some being even more favored than ourselves in this respect, and having several. Mars has two; Jupiter, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... round to the far side of the kopje, and then through a narrow gap of the rocks into a natural amphitheatre, wherein there was ample room for the formation of a great laager, the wagons being arranged in an irregular ellipse, thoroughly hidden from the veldt outside, while the rocks of the kopje roughly formed a rampart of vast ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn

... satellites, the variety of orbital and axial movement which is developed taxes the computing genius of the ablest astronomer. The path which our earth follows around the sun, though it may in general and for convenience be described as a variable ellipse, is, in fact, a line of such complication that if we should essay a diagram of it on the scale of this page it would not be possible to represent any considerable part of its deviations. These, in fact, would elude depiction, even if the draughtsman ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... investigation. They specialized in chemistry and astronomy, all measurements being applied to the heavenly bodies. Their main service was found in accurate records of data. Kepler maintained "that every planet moved in an ellipse of which the sun occupied one focus." He also held "that the square of the periodic time of any planet is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun," and "that the area swept by the radius vector from the planet to the sun ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... in the curtain there was a tiny hole, and through this opening the moonlight streamed, falling upon the table in a small, silvery ellipse, of a size which one might cover ten times with one's hand. It was natural that in this little well of pale and dreamlike radiance the Singing Mouse should find it fit to manifest itself. I knew not when it came, but as I looked, the spot had found a tenant. The small, transparent ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... we believe that 'to Him' and 'for good' are 'all things,' we cannot tell how all will come circling round. We are like men looking only at one small segment of an ellipse which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren



Words linked to "Ellipse" :   conic, conic section, elliptical, elliptic, circle



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