West is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography.
West is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points. It is the opposite of east and is perpendicular to north and south.
To go west using a compass for navigation, one needs to set a bearing or azimuth of 270°.
West is the direction opposite that of the Earth's rotation on its axis, and is therefore the general direction towards which the Sun sets.
During the Cold War "the West" was often used to refer to the NATO camp as opposed to the Warsaw Pact and non-aligned nations. The expression survives, with an increasingly ambiguous meaning.
Moving continuously west is following a circle of latitude, which, except in the case of the equator, is not a great circle.
The word west is derived from the name of one of the four dwarves in Norse mythology, Norðri, Suðri, Austri and Vestri, who each represented one of the directions of the world. cf Greek hesperus and Roman vesper.
Read more about West: Symbolic Meanings
Famous quotes containing the word west:
“In trying to understand the appeal of best-sellers, it is well to remember that whistles can be made sounding certain notes which are clearly audible to dogs and other of the lower animals, though man is incapable of hearing them.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Every other evening around six o’clock he left home and dying dawn saw him hustling home around the lake where the challenging sun flung a flaming sword from east to west across the trembling water.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The trouble about soldiers in Mr. Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry ... is that they are the kind of people who in a railroad train have to travel with their backs to the engine. Peace can have but few corners softly padded enough for such sensitives.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)