When it comes to dice, what's the appropriate way to denote the number of their sides/faces?
A six-sided die or a four-faced die?
Or have these two no difference for natives?
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3You do realize that a conventional *cubic* dice (I know the singular "die", but don't wish to encourage its use) has six faces as well as six sides? A *four-faced/sided* dice is a *tetrahedron* (the faces are triangles, not squares). See this usage chart showing that we're much more likely to refer to a six-sided* dice* than a six-faced* dice*. – FumbleFingers Apr 04 '23 at 17:07
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@FumbleFingers is this referring to the fact that each face on a traditional die is square (4 edges)? Yeah, going by the number of edges on a face would not even be enough information. 4-sided, 8-sided, and 20-sided dice all have triangular faces. – Darrel Hoffman Apr 05 '23 at 14:14
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@DarrelHoffman: My intuitive grasp of 3-d geometry isn't that good, but does that imply there are more regular-sided "dice" with far more than 20 triangular sides? My gut feel is there ought to be an infinite number of such dice - but a dice with more than 20 sides (however shaped) probably wouldn't be practical because it would be so nearly spherical we'd have trouble deciding which was the "upper" face! If indeed there was an unambiguously upper face for that shape (that's not the case for a tetrahedral dice, so there's the problem of deciding what you actually "rolled" with it! :) – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '23 at 16:34
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...okay - I've just realized there are only the 5 "platonic solids", and only 3 of them have triangular faces. I still have no intuitive understanding of why there aren't any more, but I guess that's just too deep for me! – FumbleFingers Apr 05 '23 at 16:46
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1@FumbleFingers Not that you asked but: a Platonic solid is a convex solid in which all of the faces are congruent, regular polygons, and every vertex meets the name number of faces. If the polygons have too many sides, then the measure of each angle is going to be too large to allow three faces to meet at a vertex. – Xander Henderson Apr 05 '23 at 20:06
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A fairly quick computation will show that if the number of sides is 6 or greater, then you can't have three (or more) faces meet at a vertex (the case of 6 is special---you can have three regular hexagons meet at a point, but only if they are all lying flat, hence you can't form a polygon). Hence the only possible Platonic solids have either triangular, square, or pentagonal faces. – Xander Henderson Apr 05 '23 at 20:06
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Starting with a regular triangle, you can have three faces meet at a point to make a tetrahedron, four meet at a point to make an octahedron, or five meet at a point to make an icosahedron. If six triangle meet at a point, they have to be coplanar, thus you can't produce a solid. More than that, and you can't make them fit. – Xander Henderson Apr 05 '23 at 20:07
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With a square, three faces meeting at a point gives you a cube. Four squares can meet at a point, but then they would be coplanar, so no solid. It is not possible to have five (or more) squares meet at a point in three dimensional space. Similarly, only three pentagons can meet at a point, giving rise to the dodecahedron. – Xander Henderson Apr 05 '23 at 20:07
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@FumbleFingers not all dice are platonic solids (see e.g. 10-sided and 120-sided dice). You can trivially make dice with any even number (≥6) of isosceles triangular sides (e.g. the 8-sided dice), but it will not be platonic (except the d8) because some vertices connect four such triangles, while others connect N/2. – Jacob Raihle Apr 07 '23 at 09:33
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As an American from the midwest, "sided" would be the term used by the general public, and everyone I've heard refer to dice after about grade-8 correctly uses the singular and plural forms, "die" and "dice" respectively.
As a tabletop gamer, we additionally use a particular jargon: Instead of referring to "sides" of dice, we use a shorthand. We would refer to a die by a "d" concatenated with the number of sides on that die. Therefore, a "six-sided die" would simply be a "d6" read aloud as "dee six". Ten of those dice would be "10d6", read aloud as "ten dee six". Even friends who aren't gamers pick this up really quickly. It's a lot faster to refer to gaming dice this way, since we often have handfuls of dice to cast that can look like "6d6 + 4d12 + 1d20", and they all have special uses.
Zak A. Klajda
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As another American with roots on the East coast, inter-mountain West and the Midwest, I'd pin you as a Canadian for using "grade-8". Unless, of course, we're talking about nuts and bolts. "Eighth grade" is the last year of junior high/middle school before heading off to high school... – FreeMan Apr 06 '23 at 12:45
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I'd go with 'sided' as a Brit.
Just to note, though, that very many people don't know what a 'die' is. They will use the word 'dice' for singular or plural.
Right or wrong, if you call it a 'six-sided dice', everyone will know what you mean, and only the true pedants will correct your usage of 'dice'.
In fact I got the OED to agree with me…
The form dice (used as plural and singular) is of much more frequent occurrence in gaming and related senses than the singular die.
Both the OED & Wikipedia use both terms, sides and faces, so this may be one of familiarity, rather than absolute correctness.
DoneWithThis.
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(Another Brit) I've always thought of it as 'a dice' even though I knew that strictly speaking it was 'a die' - but while browsing recently I found this question, to which many Americans answer that 'die' is commonly used over there. – Kate Bunting Apr 04 '23 at 09:43
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6I'd love to know the result of a straw poll amongst British citizens as to what "The die is cast" means [without allowing them to google it]. I'd bet the vast majority, if they knew at all, would think it something to do with metal-working. Few would go straight for "one dice was thrown & the result is now immutable." – DoneWithThis. Apr 04 '23 at 11:11
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@DoneWithThis. Speaking of dice, is it okay to say "cast the dice" along with "roll the dice" and "throw the dice"? – Monsieur Pierre Doune Apr 04 '23 at 11:24
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23I'm an American, and "a dice" really irritates me; it should always be "a die". Then again, I grumpily admit to being a tiresome pedant. – stangdon Apr 04 '23 at 11:24
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4If ‘dice’ gets accepted as the singular, before too long we'll want a way to distinguish the plural, and I really don't want to have to refer to ‘dices’… – gidds Apr 04 '23 at 18:11
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1@gidds are you happy with saying 'children'? That got pluralized twice. – Pete Kirkham Apr 04 '23 at 19:58
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2As a Canadian and an American (30+ years each side of the border), I use "die" in the singular but don't object to "dice". It's rare (ok, very rare) that i use "datum", though a singular data element, all by itself, is pretty rare. I always thought "the die is cast" related to the tool & die business, not gaming. I have, by the way, heard "dices" spoken. It sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard – Flydog57 Apr 05 '23 at 00:16
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@gidds I know some people who used dice as the singular and die as the plural! Apparently they saw an analogy to Latin -us/-i plurals. That was decidedly unusual and peculiar to them though – Tristan Apr 05 '23 at 08:47
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1@MonsieurPierreDoune (also a Brit) "cast the dice" sounds very old-fashioned, almost poetic to me (probably because of its association with the Caesar quote). I'd only ever use "roll" as the verb here, although some people use "throw" – Tristan Apr 05 '23 at 08:49
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2@MonsieurPierreDoune They are all fine, but "cast" is unusual and sounds old-fashioned ("roll" became much more common starting around 1970, but in the mid-20th century all three were fairly common). – Especially Lime Apr 05 '23 at 08:57
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3@DoneWithThis. I don't, because in most cases "data point" is a perfectly acceptable singular form. – Especially Lime Apr 05 '23 at 11:13
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4@Flydog57 I assume you weren't aware that "the die is cast" is a translation of the Latin "alea jacta est"... – stangdon Apr 05 '23 at 14:39
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I would submit that if someone did not know the word "die," they should consult a dictionary, which is not the speaker's problem to cater to. It is a basic everyday item. – RC_23 Apr 06 '23 at 02:24
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Another American who regularly corrects "a dice" to "a die", and "many legos" to "many LEGO". Sometimes just for fun. :) "The die is cast" was always about the future being set (though not necessarily in a gaming sense), and never about metal work, unless you were using a steel die. – FreeMan Apr 06 '23 at 12:42
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1@FreeMan - I was probably in my 30s before I discovered 'die' was singular; though I consider myself reasonably well-educated. It was 'wasn't a thing' when I was young enough to play board games. Legos, on the other hand makes my teeth squeak. I consider Lego like sugar. It's uncountable. You don't have many sugars [unless you're counting spoonsful in tea; likewise you can have much Lego. – DoneWithThis. Apr 06 '23 at 12:47
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I was raised by quite pedantic parents, so I learned die/dice (among others) at a young age. It helped that my mother was an English major (after nearly getting her degree in education before learning, during student teaching, that she really didn't like kids), and my father has his PhD in biology. I learned very correct English before I was allowed to play with it and make errors intentionally for fun and profit. ;) – FreeMan Apr 06 '23 at 12:53
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What fun. @DoneWithThis. I don't use datum, but data are a plural, FreeMan is half right, 'legos' is just wrong, if you want to use many, then it's lego bricks, but you don't have much, you have 'a lot of'. Generally you cast die, but throw and roll dice. You can have 'a toss of' either. For fun and err, profit: shouldn't the singular be 'douse'? :-) – mcalex Apr 07 '23 at 02:52
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@gidds For the sake of your own sanity, I suggest that you never shop for dice on Amazon -- the word "dices" appears in a disturbingly large proportion of the listings. – A C Apr 07 '23 at 04:24
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To my ear, "these dice each have 6 faces" and "these dice each have 6 sides" are completely interchangeable. Either "sides" or "faces" is a perfectly normal word to use.
However I would never used the phrase "6-faced dice". I would know what it meant instantly, but it sounds unusual enough to be "wrong". Only "6-sided dice" sounds normal.
So to the question in the title, I would say either is fine and there is no difference. But with the usage in the question body I would say only "-sided" is acceptable - though I wouldn't lose sleep over it, as "-faced" would be understood to mean exactly the same thing, it just sounds weird.
Language conventions are strange and arbitrary sometimes.
Ben
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3This is precisely my instinct as well. Talking about the faces of a die is normal; talking about an N-faced die is odd. A guess at a reason is that two-faced has such a specific and highly negatively laden meaning that it blocks the application of N-faced in other areas. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 06 '23 at 10:03
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While neither is incorrect, and both would be understood, "sided" is much more idiomatic. One can see this using Ngrams.
Incidentally, despite what one of the other answers suggests, for the singular "die" remains much more common than "dice", at least in the corpus that Google uses. (I used this phrasing to try to avoid any doubt over whether the singular or plural was meant, or whether the word was being used in a different context. Results for "a six-sided die" versus "a six-sided dice" are similar.)
Especially Lime
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2Re die vs dice I suspect that this is a case where written texts have gone through editors etc who tend to find things like that and also are more likely to recognise the Caeser quote than people speaking – mmmmmm Apr 05 '23 at 15:09
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I agree. 'Dice' to any family with children under ten playing board games, is an oral tradition not a written one. – DoneWithThis. Apr 06 '23 at 12:49
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"roll a dice" vs "roll a die" - just doing an ordinary Google.com search for the quoted phrase returns 803,000 and 648,000 results respectively in favour of "roll a dice". – MrWhite Apr 06 '23 at 23:20