The Sailor's Word-Book / An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, including Some More Especially Military and Scientific, but Useful to Seamen; as well as Archaisms of Early Voyagers, etc.

by W. H. Smyth

ANTILOGARITHM. The complement of the logarithm of a sine, tangent, or secant.

ANTIPARALLELS. Those lines which make equal angles with two other lines, but contrary ways.

ANTIPATHES. A kind of coral having a black horny stem.

ANTIPODES. Such inhabitants of the earth as are diametrically opposite to each other. From the people, the term has passed to the places themselves, which are situated at the two extremities of any diameter of the earth.

ANTISCII. The people who dwell in opposite hemispheres of the earth, and whose shadows at noon fall in contrary directions.

ANT ISLANDS. Generally found on Spanish charts as Hormigas.

ANVIL. The massive block of iron on which armourers hammer forge-work. It is also an archaism for the handle or hilt of a sword: thus Coriolanus—

"Here I clip
The anvil of my sword."

It is moreover a little narrow flag at the end of a lance.

ANYHOW. Do the duty by all means, and at any rate or risk: as Nelson, impatient for getting to Copenhagen in 1801, exclaimed—