From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishsextantsex‧tant /ˈsekstənt/ noun [countable] TMa tool for measuring angles between stars in order to calculate the position of a ship or aircraft
Examples from the Corpus
sextant• That was one of the problems of using the piste and a sextant.• Even Powell, constantly consulting sextant and compass, felt flummoxed.• Because of the track, navigation had been easy and I had been leaving my sextant in the Land Rover.• Once, Billy Hawkins got up in the middle of dinner, walked to the boats, and pulled out the sextant.• So I forgot about him, at least until that evening when I gave Ellen some practice with the sextant.• You had to be able to fix your position just like a ship at sea, with sextant and star charts.Origin sextant (1500-1600) Modern Latin sextans “sixth part of a circle”, from Latin sextus “sixth” 