A glimmer of light – octangle? Don’t be silly.
But when it did come I suddenly wondered – why isn’t it an octangle?
Alternatively, why don’t we have triagons?
The OED does allow ‘octangle’ but finds no quotation later than 1883 except for one from the Fort Worth Star Telegram in 1997: ‘The basic unit of Schwarz's system are the ‘octangle’,..and squares that are created by the spaces between intersecting octangles’ which doesn’t get us all that much further, though it led me via Google to a poem by Daniel Schwarz which starts
circular
Circular, triangular, rectangular, octangular
Shapes are beautiful, pristine, full of wonder
They can hold lives, they can hold what used to be, they can hold lies
The OED gave ‘no results’ for triagon but did have triagonal, which, it says sternly, is an erroneous formation for trigonal, ‘Of, pertaining or relating to, a trigon or triangle.’
My head is in a real spin now.
I wonder why we make such an exception for a 3 sided figure?
Well we couldn’t sing about the square on the hypotenuse of a right trigon, could we.
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