Number & MeasureGreek → English
Polygon
/ˈpɒlɪɡɒn/noun
A closed plane figure bounded by straight sides.
The Greek roots
πολύς
polýs
many
γωνία
gōnía
angle, corner
Literally: “many-angled”
The story of the word
The Greeks counted corners rather than sides, so a triangle is three-angled and a pentagon five-angled, and English inherits that habit in every name from hexagon upward. Only quadrilateral breaks ranks, counting sides in Latin. Gauss proved in 1796, aged nineteen, that a regular seventeen-sided polygon can be drawn with compass and straightedge, and asked for one on his tombstone.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
pentagonhexagondiagonaltrigonometry
In a sentence
The map renders each district as a polygon with about forty vertices.