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ICOSAHEDRON (Gr. e'IKOVL, twenty, and Ebpa, a face or base)
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ICOSAHEDRON (Gr. e'IKOVL, twenty, and Ebpa, a face or base), in geometry, a solid enclosed by twenty faces. The " regular icosahedron " is one of the Platonic solids; the " great icosahedron " is a Kepler-Poinsot solid; and the " truncated icosahedron " is an Archimedean solid (see POLYHEDRON). In crystallography the icosahedron is a possible form, but it has not been observed; it is closely simulated by a combination of the octahedron and pentagonal dodecahedron, which has twenty triangular faces, but only eight are equilateral, the remaining twelve being isosceles (see CRYSTALLOGRAPHY).