Kuusikulmainen

Kuusikulmainen is a Finnish adjective meaning hexagonal, describing something with six sides or six angles. The word is formed from kuusi (six) and kulma (angle), with the suffix -mainen meaning -shaped or -like. It is commonly used in Finnish to refer to shapes, tiles, and objects that have six sides.

In geometry, a hexagon has six sides and six angles. A regular kuusikulmainen (regular hexagon) has all sides equal and all interior angles equal to 120 degrees; the sum of interior angles is 720 degrees. Its vertices lie on a circle, with the distance from the center to a vertex equal to the side length. The hexagon can be divided into six equilateral triangles. It has three pairs of parallel opposite sides. The diagonals come in two lengths: short diagonals of length s√3 and long diagonals of length 2s, where s is the side length, for a total of nine diagonals.

Regular hexagons tile the plane without gaps, forming honeycomb patterns. This tiling property makes kuusikulmainen shapes common in tiling, design, and architecture, exemplified by hexagonal tiles. In nature, hexagonal symmetry appears in ice crystals and in bees’ honeycombs, both arising from the hexagonal lattice.

Variants of kuusikulmainen include irregular or concave six-sided polygons. The term is used in Finnish to describe any six-sided shape, though precise properties vary with the specific form.