Also 6 li-, lymasson. [Fr. = shell-snail, spiral staircase, snail-wheel, etc., f. limace (see LIMACE).]
† 1. A kind of military manœuvre. [So in OFr.]
1581. Styward, Mart. Discipl., I. 68. You shall bring them in this proportion of a ring, otherwise called a limasson.
1591. Garrard’s Art Warre, 207. To the end they may assure themselues the better, it is necessarie they make Lymassons when they are in simple and single aray.
2. (See quot.; some Dicts. give the sense as Eng.)
1839. Penny Cycl., XIV. 395/2. The Univalve Shells, as they were then [1757], called, or as Adanson denominates them, the Limaçons.
3. Math. (See quot. 1877.).
1874. Sylvester, in Proc. Roy. Instit., VII. 186, note. The Limaçon of Pascal.
1877. Cayley, in Encycl. Brit., VI. 723/1. A form which presents itself is when two ovals, one inside the other, unite, so as to give rise to a crunode—in default of a better name this may be called, after the curve of that name, a limaçon.
1879. Salmon, Higher Plane Curves (ed. 3), 44. In like manner on the radius vector to a fixed circle from a fixed point on it a portion of fixed length is taken on either side of the circle. The curve is called Pascal’s limaçon.
4. A metallic gimp (Funk’s Stand. Dict., 1893).
