Word.ws English Dictionary

semicardinal

semicardinal adjective: being or relating to a direction between two adjacent cardinal points, i.e. northwest, northeast, southwest, or southeast.

Adjective

semicardinal (not comparable)

  1. Being or relating to a direction between two adjacent cardinal points, i.e. northwest, northeast, southwest, or southeast.
    • Let the general division of the winds be as follows: Cardinal Winds, which blow from the cardinal points of heaven; Semicardinal, which blow halfway between those pointsa. 1627 (date written), Francis Bacon, “The History of the Winds”, in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, editors, The Works of Francis Bacon, […], volume V, London: Longman...
    • Historically these colors were associated with the semicardinal directions as follows: black and northeast; yellow and southeast; red and southwest; white and northwest.1996, Douglas R. Parks, Myths and Traditions of the Arikara Indians, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 95

Origin of semicardinal

semi- + cardinal

Questions about semicardinal

What does semicardinal mean?
Semicardinal means being or relating to a direction between two adjacent cardinal points, i.e. northwest, northeast, southwest, or southeast.
What part of speech is semicardinal?
Semicardinal is an adjective.

Words near semicardinal in the dictionary

  1. semicarbazide
  2. semicarbazides
  3. semicarbazone
  4. semicarbazones
  5. semicarbonaceous
  6. semicardinal
  7. semicartilaginous
  8. semicastrate
  9. semicastrated
  10. semicastrates
  11. semicastrating

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: semicardinal (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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