How to Use sextant in a Sentence

sextant

noun
  • The space sextant had two lines of sight, one fixed and one movable.
    — Amy Shira Teitel, Discover Magazine, 15 June 2019
  • Sure, a protractor works, but a sextant does this even better.
    — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 3 May 2018
  • Yet here was a guy in harm’s way trying to find his way in a war zone with something about as easy to use as a sextant.
    — Scott Canon, kansascity.com, 15 May 2017
  • Instead, long-distance sailing was done by relying on the position of stars and use of sextants.
    — Danielle Rossingh, CNN, 13 Mar. 2018
  • The astrodome included a hanging point for a sextant so navigators would not have to hold the weighty instrument.
    — David Hambling, Popular Mechanics, 25 Apr. 2021
  • Why not just rely on GPS like every yachtsman who slept through piloting class and can't remember how to work a sextant?
    — New Atlas, 2 Dec. 2025
  • Even the Portuguese flag features an old nautical instrument at its centre, which led to the stage being designed as a stylized sextant.
    — Christine Mortag, Condé Nast Traveler, 13 May 2026
  • Note that with my DIY sextant (and most others), the string would point to a value on the protractor that is not the angle above the horizon.
    — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 3 May 2018
  • For decades, economics worked like a sextant for navigating the murky waters of world commerce, whose mysteries could be charted if only one had the right models.
    — Jamie Merchant, Washington Post, 7 Nov. 2025
  • Other devices, like modern clocks, sextants for precise navigation, and much later modern computers, took their place.
    — Laura Poppick, Smithsonian, 31 Jan. 2017
  • The navigator would also use a periscopic sextant to peer through the roof of the aircraft and calculate position based on the sun and stars — exactly like an ancient mariner.
    — Cnn.com Wire Service, Mercury News, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Back in 1940, partial human remains were found on Gardner near the remnants of a campfire, along with an empty sextant box and pieces of a woman's shoe.
    — Paula McLain, Town & Country, 17 Jan. 2017
  • For centuries, using a sextant, a sailor could mark a ship’s location by making a few calculations to determine a star’s position relative to the horizon.
    — David Hambling, Popular Mechanics, 25 Apr. 2021
  • The city is having a bit of fun with the sextant versus quadrant debate, by offering up a Twitter poll and selling T-shirts with the competing designations.
    — oregonlive, 1 May 2020
  • Long before the advent of GPS and too far north for his compass to be of much use, Maultsby used only a sextant and the stars to navigate, like a sailor from a bygone era.
    — Alex Hollings, Popular Mechanics, 4 Sep. 2019
  • Chow's sextant, a navigation instrument that measured celestial objects and the horizon -- the only navigation device at that time -- was useless.
    — Maggie Hiufu Wong, CNN, 23 Aug. 2021
  • At sea, celestial navigation, which came into its own in the late 1700s, requires algorithms to crunch the inputs from a sextant that allows mariners to determine their position on the surface of a sphere.
    — Scott Neuman, NPR, 11 June 2026
  • But otherwise, the astronauts’ situation was similar enough to that of Earthly sailors to use similar technology, which means instead of a marine sextant, astronauts used a space sextant.
    — Amy Shira Teitel, Discover Magazine, 15 June 2019
  • Artifacts found on the island include a woman’s mirror compact similar to one Earhart was known to carry, a cosmetic jar, a jackknife, and a wooden box that appeared to once contain a sextant, a navigation instrument.
    — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 28 Oct. 2025
  • The sextant sailors used in the 18th century for celestial navigation had a telescopic attachment (which gave Popeye the Sailor his characteristic squint).
    — Austin Grossman, The Atlantic, 13 Oct. 2019
  • How precious are the signs of what these people actually did, whether open books or sextants or carpenter’s tools; the piano that graces a grave in the City of London, Hogarth’s tomb in Chiswick with his palette and brushes.
    — 1843, 21 May 2020
  • There are also lots of smaller instruments—thermometers, sextants, astrolabes—and plenty of globes, as well as an enormous armillary sphere, designed and built by the Italian astronomer Antonio Santucci.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 17 May 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sextant.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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