Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A figure composed of three solid or interrupted parallel lines, especially as used in Chinese philosophy or divination according to the I Ching.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as trigraph.
  • noun A geometrical form consisting of three elements, like a triangle, a triskele, a heart, etc.
  • noun In geometry, three coplanar, non-copunctal straights.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Same as trigraph.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun In Chinese Taoism, a symbol composed of three marks each of two types (creating 8 possible symbols) which are used for philosophical discussion and divination (fortunetelling).
  • noun A trigraph.
  • noun linguistics a special case of the n-gram where n is 3, used in natural language processing for doing statistical analysis of texts

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a word that is written with three letters in an alphabetic writing system

Etymologies

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Examples

  • A trigram is a combination of three lines, solid or broken, as found in the Chinese classic I Ching (The Book of Changes).

    Tibeto-Mongolian Astrology and Karma 1996

  • Everyone of the same gender has the same progressed trigram for the same age.

    Tibetan Astro Sciences ��� 1 Basic Principles 2009

  • A progressed trigram for each year of age is derived from a certain arrangement of the trigrams.

    Tibetan Astro Sciences ��� 1 Basic Principles 2009

  • Its inner trigram is ☲ (離 li2) radiance = (火) fire, and its outer trigram is identical.

    Immortal Iron Fist #8 | Major Spoilers - Comic Book Reviews and News 2009

  • The natal trigram, then, for both males and females is not calculated from their years of birth, but rather is taken as their mother's progressed trigram for her age at the year she gave birth to them.

    Tibetan Astro Sciences ��� 1 Basic Principles 2009

  • This is, you realise, the trigram structure for Presidential Arrogance.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Hal Duncan 2006

  • And besides you don't know what the Judgement and Image are for these enneagrams until you get them one day and decode the first line of the Image verse into the triple-trigram.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Hal Duncan 2006

  • So, hey, you do know what enneagram it is, and that it's the bottom trigram that's changed from water to fire.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Hal Duncan 2006

  • Korea, Southwhite with a red (top) and blue yin-yang symbol in the center; there is a different black trigram from the ancient I Ching (Book of Changes) in each corner of the white field

    Flag description 2008

  • Flag description: white with a red (top) and blue yin-yang symbol in the center; there is a different black trigram from the ancient I Ching (Book of Changes) in each corner of the white field

    Korea, South 2008

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  • Also

    any of the eight possible combinations of three whole or broken lines used especially in Chinese divination, I Ching

    January 26, 2008