page_title: Disphenoid
section_title: Honeycombs and crystals
hierarchical_section_title: Disphenoid / Honeycombs and crystals
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Oblate tetrahedrille cell in cube
context_page_description: In geometry, a disphenoid is a tetrahedron whose four faces are congruent acute-angled triangles. It can also be described as a tetrahedron in which every two edges that are opposite each other have equal lengths. Other names for the same shape are sphenoid, bisphenoid, isosceles tetrahedron, equifacial tetrahedron, almost regular tetrahedron, and tetramonohedron.
  All the solid angles and vertex figures of a disphenoid are the same, and the sum of the face angles at each vertex is equal to two right angles. However, a disphenoid is not a regular polyhedron, because, in general, its faces are not regular polygons, and its edges have three different lengths.
context_section_description: Some tetragonal disphenoids will form honeycombs. The disphenoid whose four vertices are (-1, 0, 0), (1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 1), and (0, 1, -1) is such a disphenoid. Each of its four faces is an isosceles triangle with edges of lengths √3, √3, and 2. It can tessellate space to form the disphenoid tetrahedral honeycomb. As Gibb (1990) describes, it can be folded without cutting or overlaps from a single sheet of a4 paper.
  "Disphenoid" is also used to describe two forms of crystal:
  A wedge-shaped crystal form of the tetragonal or orthorhombic system. It has four triangular faces that are alike and that correspond in position to alternate faces of the tetragonal or orthorhombic dipyramid. It is symmetrical about each of three mutually perpendicular diad axes of symmetry in all classes except the tetragonal-disphenoidal, in which the form is generated by an inverse tetrad axis of symmetry.
  A crystal form bounded by eight scalene triangles arranged in pairs, constituting a tetragonal scalenohedron.
caption: A space-filling tetrahedral disphenoid inside a cube. Two edges have dihedral angles of 90°, and four edges have dihedral angles of 60°.
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