dead reckoning

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Uncertain. Not short for deduced or deductive, but this belief explains the alternative spelling ded reckoning (which actually originated centuries later).

Pronunciation

  • Audio (US):(file)

Noun

dead reckoning (countable and uncountable, plural dead reckonings)

  1. (navigation) A method of estimating the position of a ship or aircraft by applying estimates of the distance and direction travelled from a previously known position. In respect to ships/boats, it excludes the effect of wind and current on the vessel.
    • 1911, Arthur Hamilton Clark, The Clipper Ship Era 1843-1869, Chapter 2:
      In a certain sense the captains were good sailors, but their knowledge and ambition were limited to dead reckoning, the tar bucket and marlinspike, a wife in every port, and plenty of rum and tobacco with no desire or ability to master the higher branches of navigation and seamanship.
    • 2026 March 7, Sthitapragta Chakraborty, “America Once Built Giant Arrows to Guide Pilots Across the Country, and Some Still Exist Today”, in Skip Boring‎[1], archived from the original on 24 July 2026:
      Earlier, airmail pilots relied almost entirely on visual navigation and dead reckoning, a method that sounds simple in theory, but required remarkable concentration and experience. A pilot would plot a route on a map, take a compass heading, estimate his airspeed, and calculate how long it should take to reach the next landmark.

Translations

See also

This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.