The Da Vinci Code vocabulary

When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it.

Herman Melville. Moby Dick

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John Davidson: The sun is the southern hemisphere in the winter and the northern hemisphere in the summer - that's why we have summer - and [while placing pencil on desk, pointing upwards] if you took a gnomon and set it perpendicular, which is what a gnomon is, [...] if you drew a line from the sun's declination passing through its azimuth into the center of the earth...

Johnny Carson: Axis or azimuth?

Davidson: Asimuth, azimuth.

Johnny Carson: [already bored] I see.

Davidson: [continues with rambling explanation, Carson starts silently singing a tune] A gnomon is a perpendicular instrument which is, uh, astronomical. You study astronomy, don't you?
Carson: Like an old astrolabe?

Davidson: yes, yes

Carson: similar to that?

Davidson: no, it's a straight stick. This [holding pencil] could be a gnomon.

Carson: Well, why didn't you just say a "straight stick"? I mean these people are trying to learn something, and you say "gnomon", I saw lots of people turn to each other and say, "What's a 'gnomon'?" While they were doing that [they] missed most of the explanation because these people... If you'd just said, "you take a stick", we can relate to that. You don't have to bring in "gnomons" and "declinations" and "ascensions"

Davidson: You have to challenge people. If you're not sagacious, then uhhh (audience starts jeering, Davidson smirks)

Carson: That's right, one has to be sagacious.

NBC. The Tonight Show, Dec. 19, 1979

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"But the church is far more interesting by day. The sun's rays through the oculus, the graduated shadows on the gnomon, this is what makes Saint-Sulpice unique."

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The earliest horologe or hour measurer of which history makes mention is that called the Polos, and the Gnomon. Herodotus (lib. II.) ascribes their invention to the Babylonians, but Phavorinus claims it for Anaximander, and Pliny for Anaximenes. The Gnomon, which was the more simple and probably the more ancient instrument, consisted simply of a staff or pillar fixed perpendicularly in a sunny place, the shadow of which was measured by feet upon the place where it fell,—the flight of time being computed thereby.

James W. Benson. Time and Time-Tellers

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Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism.

James Joyce. Dubliners