多面体(ためんたい)

Composed of 多(た) (many) + 面(めん) (face, surface) + 体(たい) (body, solid) — literally "many-faced solid." A technical term from geometry that refers to any solid with flat polygonal faces.

Common collocations

• 正(せい)多面体(ためんたい): regular polyhedron (Platonic solid)
• 多面体(ためんたい)の頂点(ちょうてん): vertex of a polyhedron
• 多面体(ためんたい)の辺(へん): edge of a polyhedron
• 多面体(ためんたい)の面(めん): face of a polyhedron
• 多面体(ためんたい)の体積(たいせき): volume of a polyhedron

Related words

• 立方体(りっぽうたい): cube — a regular polyhedron with six square faces
• 四面体(しめんたい): tetrahedron — a polyhedron with four triangular faces
• 八面体(はちめんたい): octahedron — a polyhedron with eight faces
• 十二面体(じゅうにめんたい): dodecahedron — a polyhedron with twelve faces
• 二十面体(にじゅうめんたい): icosahedron — a polyhedron with twenty faces

Usage

The word is used in classrooms, textbooks, and technical writing about mathematics, crystallography, and computer graphics. In casual descriptions of shapes, Japanese speakers more often refer to the specific shape (e.g., サイコロ型(がた), cube-shaped) rather than using the umbrella word 多面体(ためんたい).