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-oid is a suffix much used in the sciences and mathematics to indicate a "similarity, not
necessarily exact, to something else". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, -oid is derived from the Latin suffix -oides taken from Greek and meaning
"having the likeness of".
Thus, asteroid means "like a star" and rhomboid means "like a lozenge, or rhombus". There are many examples of such words: anthropoid, alkaloid,
factoid, trapezoid, and
so forth.
When nouns formed using -oid are turned into adjectives, the suffix usually becomes -oidal.
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