Spherical

//ˈsfɛɹɪkəl// adj

adj ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Shaped as a sphere; being a sphere.

    "The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight."

  2. 2
    Of, or pertaining to, spheres. not-comparable
  3. 3
    Of a coordinate system, specifying the location of a point in a plane by using a radius and two angles.
  4. 4
    Of or relating to the heavenly orbs, or to the sphere or spheres in which, according to ancient astronomy and astrology, they were set.

    "Knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance."

  5. 5
    Of a multivariate probability distribution, to have a covariance matrix equal to the identity matrix up to a multiplicative factor.

    "a spherical Gaussian distribution"

Adjective
  1. 1
    having the shape of a sphere or ball wordnet
  2. 2
    of or relating to spheres or resembling a sphere wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
globular3-dball shapedball-shapedbulblikebulbous

Example

More examples

"The child drew a spherical triangle."

Etymology

English spheric [from Latin sphaericus, from Ancient Greek σφαιρικός (sphairikós)] + -al.

Related phrases

spherical aberrationspherical anglespherical capspherical chickenspherical conespherical coordinatesspherical cowspherical curvespherical distancespherical excessspherical geometryspherical harmonics

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.