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parallelepiped
A polyhedron with six faces bounded by three pairs of parallel planes, so that all its faces are parallelograms. It is also a prism the base of which is a parallelogram. A rectangular parallelepiped has the shape of a shoebox (i.e., a cuboid). The word comes from the Greek word parallelepipedon for the same shape, which in turn comes from the roots para (beside), allel (other), epi (on), and pedon (ground). "Parallelepipedon" may have been first used in English by Billingsley in his 1570 translation of Euclid. It seems to have then given way to "parallelepiped" in the last quarter of the 19th century.
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