Though swinging around in the top of circus tents might not be your idea of stability, stability is why a trapeze is called a trapeze.

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In an earlier episode I reviewed how the garment leotard was named after a trapeze artist Jules Leotard. Today I’ll look into why a trapeze is called a trapeze.

When circus performers swing back and forth it is important that they don’t start to swing side to side. If they did then when they shot off into space expecting to grab their partner’s hands they’d find they were inches or feet off target and land in the net.

To keep them swinging straight, the lines from which the trapeze hangs are mounted a little further apart from each other than the length of the trapeze bar. This allows the acrobat a little more control since leaning to one side or the other will steer the swinging motion.

So when a trapeze is hanging unused its shape is a little wider at the top of the ropes than at the trapeze bar.

A shape like this, where two sides are parallel and two sides are not, is called a trapezoid.

Or maybe it’s called a trapezium.

Actually which word you use depends on which century you are living in and which language you speak, because for some reason in English the meanings of trapezoid and trapezium flipped like an acrobatic performer. In other places and in other times trapezium had parallel sides and trapezoid had no parallel sides.

It hardly matters in the circus though.

The parent of all of these words is Greek and means “table like.”

I imagined that a table has its top parallel to the floor and maybe that’s why this geometrical shape was called a trapezoid, but I was wrong.

Trapeza meaning “table” was once tetra peza meaning “four feet.”