Backstaff
- n. An instrument formerly used for taking the altitude of the heavenly bodies, but now superseded by the quadrant and sextant; — so called because the observer turned his back to the body observed.
The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.