Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Key Words, Characters and Places

Key Words

Abbott builds his vocabulary out of Euclid and the classroom and then gives it a social meaning, so that a word for a shape becomes the name of a class, a crime or a creed. Capitals mark the words that carry such a meaning, as they do in Women, Regular and Fog. The entries below are in alphabetical order. Each gives the section in which the term first appears and the sense in which the book first uses it, and none goes further. The notes refer to them by headword.

Analogy Reasoning by proportion from things known to a thing unknown, from the Greek analogia, proportion. The word first appears in § 16, where the visitor from Spaceland, having failed to make himself understood, resolves, “I must try the method of Analogy.” His argument runs from figure to figure, as a moving point makes a line and a moving line a square, and counts their end-points (1, 2, 4) and their sides (0, 2, 4) to find the next figure in the series.

Chromatistes; Colour Revolt Chromatistes is the name that “the most trustworthy authorities” give to the Pentagon who, tradition says, first discovered colour and the art of painting in remote ages (§ 8). It is Greek in look and means roughly the Colourer. Painted, he was known at a glance, and the fashion spread through every class except the Women and the Priests, in what the narrator calls the Colour Revolt, morally a time of licence and aesthetically “the glorious childhood of Art”.

Circle (Priest) In § 1 a Circle is one more shape that looks like a straight line when seen from within the plane. In § 3 a figure whose sides have become so many and so small that it cannot be told from a circle enters “the Circular or Priestly order”, the highest class of all, so that Circle and Priest name the same people. The Chief Circle appears in the same section as the head of that order.

Configuration Shape, the outline of a figure. The word first appears in § 5, in lower case, for the thing Flatlanders find so hard to know about each other, since they have great difficulty in recognising “one another’s configuration”. It must be learned by hearing, by touch or by inference from sight, and in § 12 the word becomes a capitalised doctrine (see the note there).

Feeling Recognition by touch, printed with a capital and in italics when it first appears in § 5. One Flatlander feels an angle of another to learn his class, and the polite formula of introduction asks a stranger to “feel and be felt by” one’s friend, though among fashionable young men the phrase has shrunk to a single verb. Women and the lower classes rely on it, and the higher classes avoid it.

Fog Flatland’s atmosphere, capitalised like one of the elements, which makes distant objects dimmer than near ones (§ 6). It is what makes Sight Recognition possible, and the narrator praises it as “a blessing scarcely inferior to air itself”; in the dry countries where there is no Fog, every line looks equally bright.

Irregular Having unequal sides or angles. In § 3, in lower case, the word marks the rebels who are “hopelessly irregular” and therefore put to death, so that inequality of shape is from the start a political danger. In § 6 it is capitalised as a category, the likely offspring of those who fail at the University. Then § 7, “Of Irregular Figures”, takes up the subject at length.

Isosceles Euclid’s term, Greek for equal-legged, for a triangle with two equal sides. In § 3 it becomes the name of a class, the Soldiers and the lowest Workmen, whose bases are short and whose vertices are dangerously sharp. The narrator treats them as a lower kind of being. The son of an Isosceles “remains Isosceles still”, unless the slow improvement of many generations lifts his family into the class above.

Lineland A world of one dimension, a single straight line, whose people can move and see only along it, so that each sees every other as a point and no one can ever pass a neighbour. It is named in § 13, whose heading calls the narrator’s sight of it a Vision. There the Lines are Men and the Points Women.

Peace-cry The continual sound that a Woman must keep up whenever she is in a public place, so that others know she is near, since end-on she is a mere point and from behind she is almost invisible. The penalty for silence is death. It is the second of the three laws of the Female Code (§ 4), and the word is made on the pattern of war-cry.

Pointland The world of no dimensions, named in § 20 as “the Abyss of No Dimensions”, which consists of a single Point and lies at the bottom of the book’s series of worlds, below Lineland.

Polygon, Polygonal A figure of many sides. In § 3 the Nobility begin with the six-sided Hexagons and rise in the number of their sides until they receive “the honourable title of Polygonal”. It is a rank as well as a shape. A Polygon whose sides become too many and too small to be told from a circle passes into the class of the Circles.