the.com/baseline
The line everything else gets measured against, until something better makes it look quaint.
means A starting point or established level used as a fixed reference for comparison, measurement, or expectation.
from A straightforward English compound: 'base' (from Latin 'basis,' a foundation or pedestal, via Greek) plus 'line.' It started life literally — the bottom line of a survey, a triangle, or a court — and over time stretched into the figurative sense of a fixed reference everything else is judged against. Tennis kept the original, literal back line; science, finance, and project managers borrowed the metaphor.
- tennis origin
- Names the court's back boundary line in tennis
- medical use
- First reading doctors compare all later tests against
- hidden everywhere
- Charts, budgets, science, music all secretly start here
- emotional version
- Psychologists call your default mood a happiness baseline
wilkes-barre baseline — the starting point for all u.s. public land surveys, established 1769 in pennsylvania
principal meridian — paired with baselines to create the rectangular survey system dividing 1.5 billion acres of u.s. public land