I have just learned (via a MetaFilter post) the word graticule, which is obscure enough that it’s not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The OED defines it thus:
1. A design or plan divided into squares to facilitate its proportionate enlargement or reduction; the style or pattern of such a division.
1887 GEN. WALKER in Encycl. Brit. XXII. 714/1 The graticule is sometimes rectangular, sometimes spherical, sometimes a combination of both.. Spherical graticules are constructed in various ways.
2. A transparent plate or cell bearing a grid, cross-wire, or scale, designed to be used with an optical instrument or cathode-ray oscilloscope for the purpose of positioning, measuring, or counting objects in the field of view; the scale, grid, etc., on such a plate. Hence graticuled ppl. a., fitted with a graticule.
1914 Handbk. Artill. Instrum. 42 In front of the eye-piece is fixed.. a diaphragm, with spider’s web graticules attached to it. 1919 Trans. Opt. Soc. XX. 277 Generally the graticules are on glass and it is usual to refer to the complete discs or plates with the measuring scales or marks on them, as ‘graticules’. Ibid. 286 Graticuled binoculars are not used much for peace purposes. […] 1971 Physics Bull. July 398/2 A graduation line is centred in the microscope eyepiece graticule.
If one were to be classically accurate, it should be “craticule”; the etymology is:
a. F. graticule, ad. med.L. grâtîcula, for crâtîcula gridiron, dim. of crâtis hurdle.
For meaning 2, the word reticle is also used; the words are unconnected, this one being from a diminutive of rête ‘net.’
Hah! I’m pounding myself on the back hard enough to cause contusions AND rotator cuff difficulties. I actually knew the word! Of course, it was for the obvious reason that I often enlarge drawings, and before computers actually did it manually…..
well, cartographers and geographers are giggling in glee as well. But then, we’re rather used to being on the obscure frontiers of common knowledge…
Same here – only in my case the knowledge came from a childhood (and continuing) fascination with electronics. I once owned an oscilloscope which had a knob for graticule illumination: that controlled a light set into the side of a gridded green perspex cover over the screen proper.
Is the word just not used in the US? My device was made in Britain, being of a vintage when such things happened. On the other hand, you wouldn’t use ‘grid’ because there’s a more important part of an oscilloscope with that name.
R
Twenty years later, it is now in the AHD.
The link doesn’t go to MetaFilter. Whatever you meant to link is probably irretrievable by now.
Those circumflexes should be macrons (I’m guessing you couldn’t produce macrons in 2004).
Alternately, seven years later is when AHD entered it.
As you can tell from the quotation dates, the OED’s sense 1 is unrevised from 1900, and sense 2 is unrevised from 1972 (no OED3 revision yet). AHD did not enter sense 1, which may be obsolete by now; they entered sense 2 and the (newer?) cartography sense ‘grid of longitude and latitude lines’, mentioned by Scav above.
AHD also has an improved etymology: the French word is not from Latin but borrowed from Italian. This agrees with TLFI, which says the Italian word (in verb form) was “attesté comme terme de peint. dep. 1re moitié XVIe s.” Furthermore, AHD points out that griddle is a doublet, and so is grill; those are both via the direct French descendant of the Latin. (Those French and their dropped syllables!) We also have gridiron from an eggcorn of griddle, and grid as a clipping.
The un-diminutivized Latin crātis also has English descendants: crate (originally, made of wickerwork) and grate (noun). The OED’s gloss of the Latin word as ‘hurdle’ may be misleading to present-day readers, or at least it was to me; I only knew the hurdle that a runner jumps over in a track race, with two legs and one crossbar. But I think they mean an older English sense of hurdle: a portable frame of interwoven twigs, osiers, etc. used for temporary fencing. It’s the woven criss-cross form that gives rise to all these English words involving rectangular frameworks.
Latin crātis looks like it could be cognate with the hurd of hurdle — this is suggested by the OED’s etymology for hurdle (unrevised from 1899), and Watkins’s book has it as “perhaps”, from a root meaning ‘to turn, entwine’ — but according to Wiktionary there doesn’t seem to be general agreement.
Yes, there is, according to Wiktionary – just one click away. Wiktionary is not terribly homogenous…
and the (newer?) cartography sense ‘grid of longitude and latitude lines’
This had been extended in the game of geohashing (est. 2008) to the individual cells of a gratitude grid – or, as the wiki describes it, “the rectangular zones between the latitude and longitude lines, each 1°×1° in size”.
I wonder if any dictionary is ever going to include this as a sense of the word. It’s probably too narrow…
[I guess if we remove the reference to the specific size it would be Wiktionary sense 4. It turns out that the word was added to Wiktionary in May 2008 – I wonder if the creator was a geohasher?]
the individual cells of a gratitude grid
…of a graticule grid, of course.
Normally I’d blame autocorrupt but this cannot be the case this time. I suspect I accidentally mixed it up with “latitude” and then didn’t realize because there wasn’t a red underline.
I thought it was a punning coinage in the game.
But maybe more in something Civ-like:
Gratitude Generalized location data that can be shared for strategic and diplomatic purposes.
Show gratitude Give information about your location to a player who has attacked your enemy.
Ah, a fellow civver!
a fellow civver
A long time ago. I stopped playing long games when I got kids. 25 years later, and the kids out of the house, I haven’t returned. I think I’ve lost the patience.
That’s even though both my kids did play Civ a lot and discussed it regularly. My son taught himself the history of the entire world while playing. There’s hardly a corner of the globe where he doesn’t have detailed knowledge of ancient cultures, their timelines, and their interaction.
My son taught himself the history of the entire world while playing.
Good for him!
My brother, my daughter, and her boyfriend all are playing, so I regularly get roped in again.
For lack of time I never really got out of Civ II… 🙁 …my brother plays CIV a lot, though.
(Civ IV put the LOL in haplology.)
“the rectangular zones between the latitude and longitude lines, each 1°×1° in size”
And previously at Language Hat, January First-of-May brought up geohashing names for these graticules.