![]() ![]() For some mysterious reason, the 11-sided polygon is listed here not only as hendecagon (the correct name, from the Greek hendeca, meaning 11), but also with an incorrect alternative Latin-Greek name, undecagon.Therefore nobody ever calls a six-sided polygons sexagon or sextagon, and nobody calls a seven-sided polygon septagon, no matter what my students claim. Three- and four-sided polygons, being the most common ones, commonly have Latin names ( triangle and quadrilateral), even though there are also alternative Greek names, which are very rarely used.The very existence of a two-sided polygon sounds doubtful to most people.As a better starting point, here is Wolfram Mathworld’s reasonably authoritative list of names for polygons with n sides: n As I said in an earlier post, you can usually trust Wikipedia for mathematical information, but names occupy a middle ground between math and English, so Wikipedia is less reliable in this case than with pure math. Some of my students want to look in Wikipedia or count Google hits, but those methods lead to popularity contests, not truths. Of course we shouldn’t just throw around the claim that certain names are incorrect without producing an argument for what the correct names are. Since this is Weston, I would prefer to believe it’s #1…but I have to admit that it might be #2, even in Weston. I suppose there are two major possibilities: Why do so many of my students use incorrect names for various polygons? They claim that they are merely recalling what they have been taught maybe this is so, maybe not. ![]()
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