South-Southwest, a Secondary Point of the Compass Rose

South-southwest is a bearing of 202.5 degrees, midway between south and southwest. Where a tradition does recognise more than the four or eight familiar directions, it usually adds the vertical and the centre rather than subdividing the horizon further. Buddhist cosmology commonly speaks of the ten directions, the four cardinals, the four intercardinals, the zenith and the nadir, and the phrase the Buddhas of the ten directions covers the whole of space in that sense. Jain and Hindu schemes use similar sets. Mesoamerican cosmology counts the four quarters and the centre as five directions, with the vertical axis running through the centre as the world tree. Adding up and down, rather than splitting the horizon, is the more usual way of getting beyond four, and it produces a genuinely three-dimensional scheme rather than a finer compass.

South-southwest is one of the thirty-two points of the traditional mariner's compass rose, bisecting south and southwest at 202.5 degrees. The thirty-two-point compass card, painted or engraved onto the face of a magnetic compass, became a standard fixture of European navigation from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, commonly ornamented with a fleur-de-lis marking north, a convention some historians trace to the compass card's early association with the House of Anjou, though the exact origin of the symbol's adoption for this purpose is not established with certainty. The finer thirty-two-point graduation allowed pilots to steer and to record a ship's course with considerably greater precision than the older eight-point wind rose permitted.