1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Icosahedron

ICOSAHEDRON (Gr. εἴκοσι, twenty, and ἕδρα, a face or base), in geometry, a solid enclosed by twenty faces. The “regular icosahedron” is one of the Platonic solids; the “great icosahedron” is a Kepler-Poinsot solid; and the “truncated icosahedron” is an Archimedean solid (see Polyhedron). In crystallography the icosahedron is a possible form, but it has not been observed; it is closely simulated by a combination of the octahedron and pentagonal dodecahedron, which has twenty triangular faces, but only eight are equilateral, the remaining twelve being isosceles (see Crystallography).