Arctic Circle

• arctic circle

Arctic Circle

1. The parallel of latitude that runs 66° 33′ 39″ north of the Equator, which marks approximately the southernmost place in the Northern Hemisphere where the sun does not set on the summer solstice and does not rise on the winter solstice.
   • 1603, Philemon Holland (translator), The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals written by the Learned Philosopher Plutarch of Chæronea, London, The Opinions of the Philosophers, Book 3, Chapter 14, p. 825,

     PYTHAGORAS saith, that the earth is divided into five Zones proportionably to the sphaere of the universall heaven; to wit, the Artick circle, the Tropick of Summer, the Tropick of Winter, the Aequinoctiall and the Antartick.

   • 1715, Alexander Pope, “An Essay on the Life, Writings and Learning, of Homer” in The Iliad of Homer, London: Bernard Lintott, p. 51,

     Then he tells us that the Bear, or Stars of the Arctick Circle, never disappear; as an Observation which agrees with no other.

   • 1775, Edmund Burke, The Speech of Edmund Burke, Esq; on Moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, London: J. Dodsley, p. 13,

     […] look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the Whale Fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay, and Davis’s Streights, whilst we are looking for them beneath the Arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the Antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south.

• Antarctic Circle
• polar circle