Etymology

polytope

pol·y·tope
P3O1L1Y4T1O1P3E1

Today it means: A geometric shape (of any number of dimensions) which is fully enclosed and has flat sides, making it a member of the generalized class of shapes which includes the two-dimensional polygon and three-dimensional polyhedron; (formally) a finite region of n-dimensional space bounded by hyperplanes. Full definition →

German Polytop ← Ancient Greek τόπος
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The story

  1. Ancient Greek · derived fromτόπος“region; area”
  2. German · learned borrowing fromPolytop
  3. English todaypolytope

Learned borrowing from German Polytop, originally coined by German mathematician Reinhold Hoppe in 1882, and first used in English by British mathematician Alicia Boole Stott in her 1910 paper Geometrical deduction of semiregular from regular polytopes and space fillings. By surface analysis, poly- (“many”) + -tope (“surface”), from Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “region; area”).

Words from the same roots

Ancient Greekτόπος all →

topostopiaeutopiaheterotopypolytopian-tope-topiatopo-

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.