inscribe

1 carve, cut, or etch into a material or surface; "engrave a pen"; "engraved the winner's name onto the trophy cup" [syn: engrave, grave]

2 register formally as a participant or member; "The party recruited many new members" [syn: enroll, enter, enrol, recruit]

3 draw within a figure so as to touch in as many places as possible

4 write, engrave, or print as a lasting record

5 mark with one's signature; "The author autographed his book" [syn: autograph]

6 convert ordinary language into code; "We should encode the message for security reasons" [syn: encode, code, encipher, cipher, cypher, encrypt, write in code] [ant: decode]

7 address, as a work of literature, in a style less formal than a dedication

English

Verb

1. To write or cut words onto something, especially a hard surface; to engrave.
2. To draw a circle, sphere, etc. inside a polygon, polyhedron, etc. and tangent to all its sides.

Related terms

• circumscribe
• -scribe

Translations

In geometry, an inscribed planar shape or solid is one that is enclosed by and "fits snugly" inside another geometric shape or solid. Specifically, there must be no object similar to the inscribed object but larger and also enclosed by the outer figure.

Familiar examples include circles inscribed in polygons, and triangles or regular polygons inscribed in circles.

More precisely, in the phrase "an inscribed F of X", the outer figure X is supposed to be a given, specific figure (such as, for example, "the circle centered at A with radius r"), whereas F stands for a class of figures (such as, for example, "triangle"). Of these figures, an inscribed one is a figure of maximal size among those of the same shape enclosed by X. Usually it is unique in size, but not necessarily in position and orientation.

The definition given above assumes that the objects concerned are embedded in two- or three-dimensional Euclidean space, but can easily be generalized to higher dimensions and other metric spaces.

See also

• Circumscribe

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