cube

\ \ [16] Greek kúbos meant literally ‘six-sided solid figure’, a sense handed down to English via Latin cubus. Apart from more obvious metaphorical applications, such as ‘dice’, the Greek word was used for the internal cavity of the pelvis, a semantic feature which links it with its possible relative, English hip. The fine-art term cubism was introduced to English in 1911 from French, where it seems to have been coined in 1908 by an anonymous member of the Hanging Committee of the Salon des Independents. The story goes that when a painting by Georges Braque was being shown to the committee, he exclaimed ‘Encore des Cubes! Assez de cubisme!’.