Another question reminded me of this - when I was young it was part of our education that a rectangle was distinct from an oblong. Then everyone seemed to forget about the oblongs and now I never come across them - can you tell me what happened to them?
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originallyjustme
ANSWERS: 3
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Nothing happened to them. A rectangle is a four sided polygon (a quadrilateral) that has four internal right angles. A square is a rectangle that has four sides of equal length. An oblong is a rectangle that has two sides of the same length and two sides of a different length. Thus, a square is a rectangle. An oblong is a rectangle. But a rectangle is not necessarily an oblong.
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I captured them all and have them hostage in my basement! If you ever want to see your oblong shape again, send me 100 million dollars!
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"A rectangle that is not a square is colloquially known as an oblong." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangle Society is using everyday more the language of science and mathematics. So nowadays, we do not use much the idea of an oblong. Take a rectangle in the general case: - if it is a square, we call it usually a square, not a rectangle. - if it is not a square, we call it a rectangle Before, we called it an oblong if it was not a square. Giving more details, we prefer to call the oblong a "non-square rectangle", for instance if it is important that it is not a square. If we have a word for something, we just add a "non-" before it for the opposite, so we do not need a special word.
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