Noun

Singular shape

Plural shapes

shape (plural shapes)

1. The status or condition of something

   The used bookshop wouldn't offer much due to the poor shape of the book.

2. Condition of personal health, especially muscular health.

   The vet checked to see what kind of shape the animal was in.

   We exercise to keep in good physical shape.

3. The appearance of something, especially its outline.

   He cut a square shape out of the cake.

4. A figure with unspecified appearance; especially a geometric figure.

   What shape shall we use for the cookies? Stars, circles, or diamonds?

Hyponyms

• See also Wikisaurus:shape

Derived terms

• contest shape
• in any way, shape, or form
• in no shape to
• in no way, shape, or form

• in shape
• out of shape
• shapeless
• shapely

• shape-shifter
• shape-shifting
• shipshape
• take shape
• the shape of things to come

The shape (from Old English ȝesceap, shap, etc., originally meaning created thing) of an object located in some space is the part of that space occupied by the object, as determined by its external boundary – abstracting from other properties such as colour, content, and material composition, as well as from the object's other spatial properties (position and orientation in space; size).

Mathematician and statistician David George Kendall defined shape this way:

Shape is all the geometrical information that remains when location, scale and rotational effects are filtered out from an object.

Simple two-dimensional shapes can be described by basic geometry such as points, line, curves, plane, and so on. (A shape whose points belong all the same plane is called a plane figure.) Most shapes occurring in the physical world are complex. Some, such as plant structures and coastlines, may be so arbitrary as to defy traditional mathematical description – in which case they may be analysed by differential geometry, or as fractals.