Number & MeasureGreek → English
Hexagon
/ˈhɛksəɡɒn/noun
A plane figure with six straight sides and six angles.
The Greek roots
ἕξ
héx
six
γωνία
gōnía
angle, corner
Literally: “six angles”
The story of the word
Héx, six, and gōnía, an angle or corner. Greek mathematicians used hexágōnon and English took it in the 1560s along with the whole polygon vocabulary. The hexagon is the only regular shape after the triangle and the square that tiles a flat surface without gaps, which is why bees, basalt columns and graphene all end up with it. Gōnía is also in diagonal, the line drawn corner to corner, and in trigonometry.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
hexameterpolygondiagonaloctagontrigonometry
In a sentence
Each cell of the comb is a hexagon within a fraction of a millimetre.
The board game uses hexagons so every tile has six neighbours.