I found the word quadrants in the opening of a New York Times Opinion column, titled This Just In… President Obama Is an American Citizen.
Its opening paragraph:
President Obama is not a foreigner. He is not secretly a Muslim. Those are the facts, but they do not seem to matter in many quadrants of the Republican Party.
Oxford Dictionary defines quadrant simply as
- a quarter of a circle of its circumference
- an instrument for measuring angles (and that was my understanding)
However, quadrants seems to be used with a different meaning, here. Does it mean members, supporters or sectors?