Asymmetry
/eɪˈsɪmɪtri/noun
Lack of balance or correspondence between two sides of something.
The Greek roots
Literally: “not measured together”
The story of the word
συμμετρία means having a common measure, so ἀσυμμετρία was the Greek mathematicians' word for incommensurability: the diagonal of a square and its side cannot both be counted in the same unit. That discovery, credited to the Pythagoreans, wrecked the assumption that every magnitude is a ratio of whole numbers. English uses the word for lopsidedness instead, a sense that arrives in the 17th century, and particle physicists now use it for the tiny imbalance that left the universe with matter in it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
There is a slight asymmetry in every face, and photographs of mirrored halves look wrong.