Other forms: triangles
A triangle is a shape with three straight sides and three corners. A slice of pizza, a warning road sign, the sail on a small boat leaning into the wind.
Maths names the family: equilateral with three equal sides, isosceles with two, right-angled with one square corner. The adjective is triangular — a triangular flag, a triangular field. In an orchestra the triangle is the small percussion instrument, a steel bar bent into three sides and struck with a metal rod, and one tap carries over the whole band. A love triangle is three people tangled together, two of them wanting the same one. And the Bermuda Triangle is the patch of sea that swallows ships in stories.
1nountriangleA flat shape with three straight sides and three angles.~96%
“Cut each sandwich into two triangles.”
2nounpercussionA percussion instrument made of a steel bar bent into three sides, played by striking it with a metal rod.~2%
“One child played the triangle at the back of the school orchestra.”
3nounsituationA situation involving three people, especially two who want the same partner.~2%
“The play turns on a love triangle among the neighbours.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
triangle is a shape.
Triangle is Latin arithmetic in a single word: tres, three, plus angulus, corner, giving triangulus, three-cornered. Latin turned that adjective into a noun, triangulum, and Old French handed it to English with the spelling intact. The corners are named inside the word.
Proto-Indo-European
*tréyes
Latin
triangulum
Old French
triangle
Middle English
triangle
English, today
triangle
Built from
From Middle English triangle, from Old French triangle, from Latin triangulum, noun use of adjective triangulus (“three-cornered, having three angles”), from trēs (“three”) + angulus (“corner, angle”), equivalent to tri + angle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA