Points of the compass 32-wind compass rose is yielded from the eight principal winds, eight half-winds and sixteen quarter-winds combined together, with each compass direction point at an ° angle from the next. In the mariner's exercise of boxing the compass, all thirty-two points of the compass are named in clockwise order. The traditional compass rose of eight winds (and its 16-wind and 32-wind derivatives) was invented by seafarers in the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages (with no obvious connection to the twelve classical compass winds of the ancient Greeks and Romans). The traditional mariner's wind names were expressed in Italian, or more
Points of the compass organisations. "It is the custom in the United States Navy to box "from" north and south "toward" east and west, with the exception that divisions adjacent to a cardinal or inter-cardinal point are always referred to that point." The Royal Navy used the additional "rule that quarter points were never read from a point beginning and ending with the same letter." Compass roses very rarely named the fractional points and only showed small, unlabelled markers as a guide for helmsmen. The table below shows how each of the 128 directions are named. The first two columns give the number of