"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

Saturday 9 February 2013

Gnomon




I already knew that a gnomon was the projecting piece on a sundial that shows the time by the position of its shadow but I recently read the word in a context where that didn't make sense.  Upon looking it up I discovered that a gnomon is also the geometric figure that remains after a parallelogram has been removed from a similar but larger parallelogram with which it shares a corner.

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