South

South is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points, directly opposite north and perpendicular to both west and east. The term originates from Old English sūþ, which traces back to the Proto-Germanic sunþaz, a word possibly related to the same Proto-Indo-European root that gave rise to the word for the sun.

In many languages, the concept of south is tied to the sun’s position at noon in the Northern Hemisphere; for instance, Latin uses meridies (from medius ‘middle’ and dies ‘day’) to mean both ‘noon’ and ‘south’. Other languages describe south as the right-hand side of the rising sun, as seen in Biblical Hebrew teiman (from yamin ‘right’), Aramaic taymna, and Syriac taymna—a naming pattern that also gave Yemen its name, as the land to the south or right of the Levant. South is commonly abbreviated as S.

Navigation

By convention, the bottom of a map is south, though reversed maps exist that defy this rule. When using a compass for navigation, a bearing or azimuth of 180° points south. In the Northern Hemisphere outside the tropics, the sun is roughly in the south at midday.

South Pole

True south is one end of Earth’s rotational axis, known as the South Pole, located in Antarctica. Magnetic south points toward the south magnetic pole, which lies some distance from the geographic South Pole. The first person to reach the South Pole was Roald Amundsen of Norway, on 14 December 1911, after Ernest Shackleton of the UK was forced to turn back short of the goal.

Geography

Geographically, the term “Global South” refers to the less-developed southern half of the globe, where only 5% of the population has enough food and shelter, compared to 95% in the Global North. The South is characterized by a lack of appropriate technology, political instability, disarticulated economies, and dependence on primary product exports. Country-relative uses of “South” also appear, such as the Southern United States (separated from the Northeast by the Mason–Dixon line) or the South of England, which contrasts politically and economically with the North. The Southern Cone describes the southernmost area of South America, encompassing Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the entire South of Brazil (including the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and São Paulo); in a narrower sense it covers only Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.