Northern Waggoner

English

Northern Waggoner

Proper noun

Northern Waggoner

1. (astronomy, obsolete) The Big Dipper.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, , stanzas 1-5, page 1:

     By this the Northerne wagoner had set
     His sevenfold teme° behind the stedfast starre,
     That was in Ocean waves yet never wet,
     But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre
     To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre:

   • 1613, Thomas Heywood, An Epithalamion, or Nuptiall Song, A Marriage Triumph on the Nuptials of the Prince Palatine, and the Princess Elizabeth, Daughter of James I, London: Reprinted for the Percy Society, 1842, p. 8,^[1]

     The Northern Waggoner stands next in the roll,

     Whom Perseus with his shield frights ’bout the pole,

   Synonyms: Big Dipper, (obsolete Britain) Charles' Wain, (obsolete USA) Drinking Gourd, (Asia) Northern Ladle, (Britain) Plough, (obsolete Britain) Wain