A quadrant is one-fourth of a circle. When you bake an apple pie and then cut it equally so that you and three of your friends get pieces that are the same size, you'll each get a quadrant of the pie.
When a circle is evenly divided into four sections by two perpendicular lines, each of the four areas is a quadrant. In fact, anything that's split into four equal parts can be described as being made up of quadrants, like a quadrant of a public park. The Latin root word is quadrantem, fourth part, and for many years quadrant was used to mean six hours, or one-quarter of a day.
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any of the four areas into which a plane is divided by two orthogonal coordinate axes
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n |
a measuring instrument for measuring altitude of heavenly bodies
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