The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (4 page)

triangular with unequal sides
scalene
triangular with two equal sides
isosceles
 
 
The Russian defences consisted of a semi-elliptical-shaped fort containing 62 casemates on each of two floors from which heavy guns mounted in the centre could sweep the bay almost at water level. Behind the ellipse, and part of the fort, stood a large horseshoe-shaped work on two floors with casemates armed with heavy guns to flank the landward approaches. In the hills behind lay three round towers, also casemated, their guns commanding the countryside. All the masonry was granite, constructed in polygonal form similar to the method used by the Austrians at Verona.
QUENTIN HUGHES,
Military Architecture
 
 
Anyone climbing the steps stood straight into the sky, and the wind in their clothes and the sky with its scarves of cloud and the trumpet shapes of the trees, made the figures like gay and flimsy dancers cut from paper.
RUMER GODDEN,
Black Narcissus
 
 
The volcano rises as an isolated and well-formed cone about 3000 m above the floor of the Banda Sea. The perfection of the cone is marred by two very large and one small slump scars on the upper slopes and by fan-shaped slump deposits at corresponding positions at the base of the slope, underwater. Two of the slump scars are subaerial at the top; they have steep, radial side walls and form deep embayments in the small, otherwise circular islands.
H. W. MENARD, Islands
 
triangular with equal sides
equilateral
triangular inversely
obcuneate, obdeltoid
 
being a three-dimensional pointed figure with a base and triangles
(usually four or three) for sides
pyramidal
inversely pyramidal
obpyramidal
being a triangular (with three upright sides) pyramid
tetrahedral
 
having four
sides and four angles
quadrilateral, quadrangular, quadrangled, tetragonal
four-sided with all right angles and equal sides
square, foursquare, quadrate
four-sided with all right angles (right-angled parallelogram)
rectangular
four-sided with opposite sides parallel and equal
parallelogrammatic
four-sided with two sides parallel
trapezoidal, antiparallelogrammatic
four-sided (parallelogram) with equal but non-right-angled sides (or not a
square)
rhombic, rhombical
four-sided (parallelogram) with unequal non-right-angled sides
rhomboid
somewhat like a rhomboid figure (rhombus or rhomb)
rhomboidal
four-sided with no parallel sides
trapeziform, trapezial
 
 
Volcanic islands generally are circular or elliptical cones or domes, and it is easy to visualize the influence of their shape upon erosion by imagining simple circular cones that lie in seas without waves and on which rain falls uniformly. The consequent rivers that develop on a cone are radial because the slopes of the cone are radial. The side slopes of the river valleys tend to be relatively constant but the longitudinal slopes are steeper in the headwaters than at the shoreline. Thus the valleys of the radial streams are funnel shaped; they are narrow and shallow at the shoreline and spread into great, deep amphitheaters in the interior.
H. W. MENARD.
Islands
 
 
This square-shaped labyrinth is made entirely of straight lines, which are much easier to scratch than concentric curves.
ADRIAN FISHER AND GE0RG GERSTER,
Labyrinth
 
 
The great breakthrough, however, was in the development of the medieval Christian labyrinth design. This had eleven rings instead of seven, a characteristic cruciform design, and most significantly, the paths ranged freely through the quadrants, rather than methodically proceeding quarter by quarter in the Roman way. A manuscript in the Vatican dated AD860-2 contains a prototype of this innovatory medieval Christian design, and the tenth-century Montpellier manuscript portrays the design more formally. It was executed in two main forms, circular and octagonal.
ADRIAN FISHER AND GEORG GERSTER, Labyrinth
 
being a four-sided figure with two equal acute and two equal obtuse
angles (or a long rhomboid figure with the diagonal perpendicular to the
horizontal)
diamond, lozenge-shaped
 
solid with six square faces
cubic
somewhat cubic in shape
cuboid, cuboidal
 
having an evenly extended or elongated round shape
cylindrical, columnar, columnal, pillar-like, shaft-like
narrowly cylindrical
tubular, tubulate
more or less cylindrical but tapering at one or both ends
terete
 
being a rounded figure (with a circular base) that tapers upward to a point
conical, conic, funnel-shaped
somewhat conical
conoid, conoidal
conical with the pointed end below
obconic
like two opposite-pointing cones having the same base
biconical
 
being a five-sided plane figure (polygon)
pentagonal
being a six-sided plane figure
hexagonal
being a seven-sided plane figure
heptagonal
being an eight-sided plane figure
octagonal
being a nine-sided plane figure
nonagonal
 
 
Why the images standing beneath the quarries had been set up in such a disorderly fashion, why they were left blind and without red cylinders on top, and why statues with keel-shaped backs were not to be found outside the quarry area remained a mystery to her.
THOR HEYERDAHL,
Easter Island: The Mystery Solved
 
 
Orion is outlined by four bright stars at the corners of an imaginary trapezoid. Within the space defined by these four points, and seeming to draw them together into a pattern, is a row of three stars tilted at an angle—Orion’s belt. Arcing downward from the belt is another group of fainter stars—his sword.
GALE LAWRENCE,
A
Field
Guide to
the Familiar
 
 
First of all, when you consider the shape of a chickadee’s body, you will notice that it’s round. Whereas a blue jay is elongated, and a nuthatch tapered and slightly flattened, a chickadee is like a little ball. This roundness helps the small bird balance itself in the topsy-turvy positions it assumes while it’s searching for insect eggs on the twigs and outer branches of trees.
GALE LAWRENCE,
A Field Guide to the Familiar
 
 
Earth flows move slower than debris flows and mudflows. They usually have a spoon-shaped sliding surface with a crescent-shaped cliff at the upper end and a tongue-shaped bulge at the lower end....
PETER BIRKELAND AND EDWIN LARSON,
Putnant’s Geology
 
being a ten-sided plane figure
decagonal
being a twelve-sided plane figure
dodecagonal
 
being a (three-dimensional) polyhedron with four faces
tetrahedral
being a polyhedron with five faces
pentahedral
being a polyhedron with six faces
hexahedral
being a polyhedron with eight faces
octahedral
being a polyhedron with twelve faces
dodecahedral
being a polyhedron with twenty faces
icosahedral
being a polyhedron with twenty-four faces
icositetrahedral
 
picture-like as a representational form
glyphic, pictographic, hieroglyphic
 
 
PARTICULAR SHAPES
OR LIKENESSES
 
acorn-shaped
glandiform, glanduliform
almond-shaped
amygdaloid, amygdaliform
alphabet-like
alphabetiform
amoeba-shaped
amoebiform, amoeboid
 
 
Ultimately, the valley slopes take on a sigmoidal form with the upper convex slope formed by creep and a lower concave slope formed by wash processes.
PETER BIRKELAND AND EDWIN LARSON,
Putnam Geology
 
 
If we look through a window at a mass of buildings, or any external objects, and observe that part of the glass to which each object, line, or point, appears opposite, we find that their apparent situation is very different from their real. We find that horizontal lines sometimes appear oblique, or even perpendicular, that circles, in certain situations, look like ellipses, and squares like trapezoids or parallelograms.
JACOB BICELOW,
The Useful Arts
 
 
Two of the most famous, long landmarks of Manhattan are the Flatiron Building, erected in 1902, and the Times Building (recently remodeled as the Allied Chemical Building), in 1904. Both have odd, trapezoidal floor plans, dictated by the pie-shaped real-estate slices Broadway strews along its diagonal path as it crosses Manhattan avenues, Fifth at Twenty-third, site of the Flatiron, and Seventh at Forty-second, site of the Times. The resulting slenderness of the two buildings, plus the absence of scientific data on wind stresses, caused the New York engineers to take special precautions. Triangular “gusset plates” were inserted as braces, four to each joint of horizontal beam and vertical column.
JOSEPH GIES,
Wonders of the Modern World
 
antenna-shaped
antenniform
apple-shaped
maliform, pomiform
apse-shaped
apsidal
arch-shaped
arciform
arm-shaped
brachial
arrowhead-shaped
sagittate, sagittiform
arrowhead-shaped (with flaring or spear-shaped barbs)
hastate
awl-shaped
subulate, subulated, subuliform
ax-shaped or cleaver-shaped
dolabriform, dolabrate, securiform, axiniform
 
bag-shaped
sacciform, scrotiform, bursiform
ball-shaped
conglobulate
bark-like
corticifonn
barley-grain-shaped
hordeifonn
barrel-shaped
dolioform
basin-shaped
pelviform
basket-shaped (small basket)
corbiculate
beak-shaped
rostate, rhamphoid, rostriform
 
 
Later, experimenting with small and full-size gliders, he found that setting the wings at a slight dihedral (or shallow V-shaped) angle to each other gave lateral stability, and that a tail plane set behind the main wings was necessary for longitudinalstability. ALVIN M. JOSEPHY, JR., ED.,
The American Heritage History of Flight
 
 
Often the edges bounding a face make up a fairly simple plane figure—a triangle, or a square, or the like. And often the faces bounding the whole crystal make up a corresponding simple solid figure—a cube, a tetrahedron, or an octahedron....
ALAN HOLDEN AND PHYLIS MOPRISON,
Crystals and Crystal Growing
 
 
These consist of cylindrical cells set together to form a palisade-like layer.... Each cell is polygonal in horizontal section; cuboidal cells are square in vertical section, whereas columnar cells are taller than their diameter. Commonly, microvilli are found on the free surface of such cells, providing a large, absorptive area ..., as in the epithelium of the small intestine (columnar cells with a striated border), the gall bladder (columnar cells with a brush border) and the proximal and distal convoluted tubules of the kidney (large cells with brush borders).
PETER L. WILLIAMS AND ROGER WARWICK,
Gray’s Anatomy

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