cylindrical

US/sɪˈlɪndɹɪkəl/

adjectiveB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — cylinder sits at #6,689mostly writtentechnical · an editor’s judgement

Cylindrical means shaped like a tin can or a length of pipe — round all the way along, flat at each end.

It is the adjective from cylinder, and it does most of its work in technical description: a cylindrical tank, a cylindrical battery, the cylindrical bales left in a field after harvest. Where you would say tube-shaped in speech, an engineer writes cylindrical. The family around it is worth learning together, since they all behave the same way in a sentence — spherical for a ball, conical for a cone, cubic for a cube.

Definitions of cylindrical

1adjectivecylindricalShaped like a cylinder, a round tube with flat ends.B2
“The lamp has a plain cylindrical shade.”

Where it comes from

Ancient Greek
κύλινδρος
Latin
cylindrus
Middle French
chilindre
English
cylinder
English, today
cylindrical

From cylindricus + al. by surface analysis, cylinder + -ical. cylinder comes from Middle French chilindre, cylindre, from Latin cylindrus, from Ancient Greek κύλινδρος, from κυλίνδω "I roll or wallow" (intransitive). a doublet of calander and calender.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

cylindrical in the wild

Bessel functions are a class of special functions that commonly appear in problems involving wave motion, heat conduction, and other physical phenomena with circular or cylindrical symmetry.
Bessel function
The Mercator projection () is a conformal cylindrical map projection first presented by Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
Mercator projection
Slide rules exist in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear, circular or cylindrical form.
Slide rule
A cylindrical coordinate system is a three-dimensional coordinate system that specifies point positions around a main axis (a chosen directed line) and an auxiliary axis (a reference ray).
Cylindrical coordinate system
The main axis is variously called the cylindrical or longitudinal axis.
Cylindrical coordinate system

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the chilindre family

cylinder

cylindrical — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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