OBLIQUITY

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does obliquity mean? 

• OBLIQUITY (noun)
  The noun OBLIQUITY has 2 senses:

1. the presentation during labor of the head of the fetus at an abnormal angle

2. the quality of being deceptive

  Familiarity information: OBLIQUITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• OBLIQUITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The presentation during labor of the head of the fetus at an abnormal angle

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

asynclitism; obliquity

Hypernyms ("obliquity" is a kind of...):

abnormalcy; abnormality (an abnormal physical condition resulting from defective genes or developmental deficiencies)

Holonyms ("obliquity" is a part of...):

childbed; confinement; labor; labour; lying-in; parturiency; travail (concluding state of pregnancy; from the onset of contractions to the birth of a child)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The quality of being deceptive

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

deceptiveness; obliquity

Hypernyms ("obliquity" is a kind of...):

dishonesty (the quality of being dishonest)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "obliquity"):

meretriciousness; speciousness (an appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility)

Derivation:

oblique (indirect in departing from the accepted or proper way; misleading)

 Context examples 

Theory that proposes large scale climate changes are due in part to the variations in precession, eccentricity and obliquity that affects the amount of solar radiation received by the earth.

(Orbital forcing, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

And yet it is this very obliquity of thought and memory which makes mental disease such a fascinating study.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

The angle between the planes of the celestial equator and the ecliptic, currently the earth has a 23.4 degree obliquity cycle.

(Obliquity, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

And thus, by changing the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from one part of the dominions to the other.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

It was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)