Word "Forms" (2 of 4)

Many sides, no conflict.

Last time out, we covered most three-sided and four-sided word forms…and we got the diamond in the prior installment, but here’s another one (a single one) just to be thorough. Like all word forms, these should be read across and down, and “single” forms read the same way across and down. Whenever a word form can be single, in the NPL’s examples, it generally is.

What about more sides? Well, here are four variations on the word pentagon, two of which are single, two necessarily double…

The NPL recognizes three kinds of word hexagons, basic…

Left Cambridge hexagon…

And right Cambridge hexagon.

Nobody’s figured out a word heptagon yet. But here’s a word octagon…

This is also about as close as one can reasonably get to a word circle. In computing, one draws a circle by just adding more and more sides to a figure until one ends up with something indistinguishable from a circle. You can see from the images below that a dodecagon (a twelve-sided figure) is already looking pretty circle-ish.

But in practical terms, designing an evenly symmetrical shape with more signs than the octagon just ain’t gonna happen—you’d have to make too many words too long just to achieve the necessary “resolution.”

There is such a thing as a word enneagon, though! Shapewise, it looks like a word pentagon joined to a couple of word squares. Like pentagons, these nine-siders can point in multiple directions, and some can be single while some are inherently double:

Look like a pair of dancing pants, don’t they?

Side note: as you may have noticed, the modern rules for NPL forms allow the use of proper names like LARUE and OREL, as well as common phrases like CLEANS OFF and SESAME SEED. (You can find those examples just in the two enneagons right above.)

So much for the forms defined by their number of sides. Next time out, we’ll look at some even more complex constructions…