Number & MeasureGreek → English
Octagon
/ˈɒktəɡɒn/noun
A plane figure with eight straight sides and eight angles.
The Greek roots
ὀκτώ
oktṓ
eight
γωνία
gōnía
angle, corner
Literally: “eight angles”
The story of the word
Eight angles, from oktṓ and gōnía. Athens still has a famous one standing: the Tower of the Winds in the Roman agora, built around the first century BC, with a wind god carved on each of its eight faces, sundials below them and a water clock inside. English took the word in the 1650s along with the rest of the polygon set. Oktṓ is also why October was the eighth month before Rome shifted the calendar under it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
octaveoctopusOctoberhexagonpolygon
In a sentence
A stop sign is an octagon so drivers recognise it from behind.
The chapel is an octagon with a lantern at the top.