My research involves rectangles that differ in their width/height ratio, and I am looking for words to describe them. Specifically, consider these 4 rectangles.
What adjective describes a rectangle whose height is much larger than the width (like the light-blue one)?
What adjective describes a rectangle whose height is larger than the width, but not very much (like the light-green one)?
What adjective describes all rectangles whose height is larger than the width (like the two light-colored)?
What adjective describes a rectangle whose width is much larger than the height (like the dark-blue one)?
What adjective describes a rectangle whose width is larger than the height, but mildly (like the dark-green one)?
What adjective describes all rectangles whose width is larger than the height (like the two dark-colored)?
What adjective describes a rectangle with extreme difference between width and height (like the two blue-colored)?
What adjective describes a rectangle with mild difference between width and height (like the two green-colored)?
Answer
You can describe the two rectangles for which H/W > 1.0 as tall, and the two for which H/W < 1.0 as wide or broad. The two tall rectangles could be distinguished as tall and skinny, the two wide ones as wide and flat. The two extreme rectangles could be described as skinny or narrow or thin, but antonyms of these terms, wide, fat would not serve well to describe the less extremely proportioned ones; I can’t think of a term which would work.
If you are going to be working only with rectangles of these four basic proportions you can refer to them by arbitrary labels,A, B, C, D, or by color (but you’ll have to have a more distinct palette). If you are going to be using rectangles of many proportions, I suggest that in a research paper it would be proper to use numeric values reflecting the H/W ratio, perhaps with arbitrary designations of particular ranges; for example:
In what follows I will employ the following designations:
. . . H/W < 0.25‘flat’
0.25 ≤ H/W < 0.80‘wide’
0.80 ≤ H/W ≤ 1.25‘square’
1.25 < H/W ≤ 4.0‘tall’
4.0 < H/W . . .‘skinny’
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Erel Segal-Halevi , Answer Author : StoneyB on hiatus
