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!bgcolor=#e7dcc3 colspan=2|Regular octagon
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A regular octagon
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Edges and
vertices||8
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Schläfli symbols||{8}
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Coxeter–Dynkin diagrams||



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Symmetry group||
Dihedral (D
8)
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Area(with
a=edge length)||
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Internal angle(
degrees)||135°
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|bgcolor=#e7dcc3|Properties||
convex,
cyclic,
equilateral,
isogonal,
isotoxal|}
In
geometry, an
octagon is a
polygon that has
eight sides. A regular octagon is represented by the
Schläfli symbol {8}.
Regular octagons

A regular octagon is
constructible with
compass and straightedge. To do so, follow steps 1 through 18 of the animation, noting that the compass radius is not altered during steps 7 through 10.
A regular octagon is always an octagon whose sides are all the same length and whose internal angles are all the same size.
The internal
angle at each vertex of a
regular octagon is 135
° and the sum of all the internal angles is 1080°.
The area of a regular octagon of side length
a is given by
In terms of
, (
circumradius) the area is
In terms of
, (
inradius) the area is
Naturally, those last two
coefficients bracket the value of
pi, the area of the
unit circle.
frame|The regular octagon can be computed as a
truncated square./" class="wiki">area of a
regular octagon can be computed as a
truncated square.
The area can also be derived as follows:
where
S is the span of the octagon, or the second shortest diagonal; and
a is the length of one of the sides, or bases. This is easily proven if one takes an octagon, draws a square around the outside (making sure that four of the eight sides touch the four sides of the square) and then taking the corner triangles (these are
45-45-90 triangles) and placing them with right angles pointed inward, forming a square. The edges of this square are each the length of the base.
Given the span
, the length of a side
is:
The area, is then as above:
As any regular sided polygon can be divided into numbers of equal rightangled triangles, the area can also be calculated more simply, in the case of one with an even number of sides, by taking the distance between any two opposite sides (
A), dividing by two and then multiplying by the length of one side(
B), divided by four and then multiplying by twice the total of the number of sides (
N) as follows:
((A/2) * (B/4)) * 2NNot as, mathematically, pretty as some of the above formulae, but certainly simpler for the layman and also works for any regular polygon by just changing the value of N.
(For regular polygons with an uneven number of sides
A is calculated as the distance between the point of one angle to the mid point of the side opposite.)
Uses of octagons
Derived figures
Petrie polygons
The
octagon is the
Petrie polygon for four higher dimensional polytopes, shown in these skew
orthogonal projections:
See also