James A. H. Murray (1926). A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society. X. Clarendon Press at Oxford. стр. 286 (Trapezium). „With Euclid (c 300 B.C.) τραπέζιον included all quadrilateral figures except the square, rectangle, rhombus, and rhomboid; into the varieties of trapezia he did not enter. But Proclus, who wrote Commentaries on the First Book of Euclid's Elements A.D. 450, retained the name τραπέζιον only for quadrilaterals having two sides parallel, subdividing these into the τραπέζιον ἰσοσκελὲς, isosceles trapezium, having the two non-parallel sides (and the angles at their bases) equal, and σκαληνὸν τραπέζιον, scalene trapezium, in which these sides and angles are unequal. For quadrilaterals having no sides parallel, Proclus introduced the name τραπέζοειδὲς TRAPEZOID. This nomenclature is retained in all the continental languages, and was universal in England till late in the 18th century, when the application of the terms was transposed, so that the figure which Proclus and modern geometers of other nations call specifically a trapezium (F. trapèze, Ger. trapez, Du. trapezium, It. trapezio) became with most English writers a trapezoid, and the trapezoid of Proclus and other nations a trapezium. This changed sense of trapezoid is given in Hutton's Mathematical Dictionary, 1795, as ‘sometimes’ used -- he does not say by whom; but he himself unfortunately adopted and used it, and his Dictionary was doubtless the chief agent in its diffusion. Some geometers however continued to use the terms in their original senses, and since c 1875 this is the prevalent use.”
For example: French trapèze, Italian trapezio, Portuguese trapézio, Spanish trapecio, German Trapez, Ukrainian "трапеція", e.g. „Larousse definition for trapézoïde”.
πέζα is said to be the Doric and Arcadic form of πούς "foot", but recorded only in the sense "instep [of a human foot]", whence the meaning "edge, border". τράπεζα "table" is Homeric. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, Clarendon Press (1940), s.v. πέζα, τράπεζα.
