parallelepiped love

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A solid with six faces, each a parallelogram and each being parallel to the opposite face.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A prism whose bases are parallelograms.
  • noun in experimental psychology, an outline drawing of a parallelepiped, with one diagonal drawn in, embodying an illusion of reversible perspective. The figure was published by Necker in 1832: the name ‘cube’ properly belongs to a similar figure published by Wheatstone in 1838. See illusion. 2.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Geometry) A prism whose bases are parallelograms.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun geometry Solid figure, having six faces, all parallelograms; all opposite faces being similar and parallel.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a prism whose bases are parallelograms

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Greek parallēlepipedon : parallēlos, parallel; see parallel + epipedon, plane surface, from neuter sing. of epipedos, level (epi-, epi- + pedon, ground; see ped- in Indo-European roots).]

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Examples

Comments

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  • I saw Laiane's comment on parallelopiped and thought, isn't it spelled parallelipiped? Turns out it's "parallelepiped": the derivation is parallelus + epipedum. In technical writing, parallelepiped is used more than 95% of the time (in Google Scholar), but in more general writing (Google Books), only 60% of the time, with parallelopiped getting 27%, parallelipiped 12%, and parallelapiped 1%. Perhaps parallelogram and parallelism are influencing the spelling of parallelepiped? Interesting that Weirdnet lists both parallelepiped and parallelopiped.

    December 1, 2007

  • clearly, this is the word which would get me eliminated from the spelling bee, because if you had asked me, I would have chosen parallelapiped. Though, apparently, at the time I entered it into Wordie, parallelopiped seemed like the correct choice. Probably, as mollusque surmises, by analogy with parallelogram.

    December 1, 2007

  • According to Dictionary.com, this word is derived from Greek as follows: parállél(os) parallel + epíped(on) plane, nominal use of the neuter form of epípedos flat, equiv. to epi- upon + pédon ground. So the -epi- element is constituent to the word; -piped alone makes no sense in etymological terms. I would guess that this word is properly pronounced parallel-EH-pee-ped.

    September 26, 2008