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Latitude and Longitude

Any location on Earth is described by two numbers--its latitude and its longitude. If a pilot or a ship's captain wants to specify position on a map, these are the "coordinates" they would use.
    Actually, these are two angles, measured in degrees, "minutes of arc" and "seconds of arc." These are denoted by the symbols ( °,   ',   "  ) e.g. 35° 43' 9" means an angle of 35 degrees, 43 minutes and 9 seconds (do not confuse this with the notation (', ") for feet and inches!). A degree contains 60 minutes of arc and a minute contains 60 seconds of arc--and you may omit the words "of arc" where the context makes it absolutely clear that these are not units of time.

On a globe of the Earth, lines of latitude are circles of different size. The longest is the equator, whose latitude is zero, while at the poles--at latitudes 90° north and 90° south (or -90°) the circles shrink to a point.

Longitude

On the globe, lines of constant longitude ("meridians") extend from pole to pole, like the segment boundaries on a peeled orange. Every meridian must cross the equator. Since the equator is a circle, we can divide it--like any circle--into 360 degrees, and the longitude φ of a point is then the marked value of that division where its meridian meets the equator.

What that value is depends of course on where we begin to count--on where zero longitude is. For historical reasons, the meridian passing the old Royal Astronomical Observatory in Greenwich, England, is the one chosen as zero longitude. Located at the eastern edge of London, the British capital, the observatory is now a public museum and a brass band stretching across its yard marks the "prime meridian." Tourists often get photographed as they straddle it--one foot in the eastern hemisphere of the Earth, the other in the western hemisphere. A lines of longitude is also called a meridian, derived from the Latin, from meri, a variation of "medius" which denotes "middle", and diem, meaning "day." The word once meant "noon", and times of the day before noon were known as "ante meridian", while times after it were "post meridian." Today's abbreviations a.m. and p.m. come from these terms, and the Sun at noon was said to be "passing meridian". All points on the same line of longitude experienced noon (and any other hour) at the same time and were therefore said to be on the same "meridian line", which became "meridian" for short.