The adjective octuple (Latin octu-plus) may also be used as a noun, meaning "a set of eight items"; the diminutive octuplet is mostly used to refer to eight siblings delivered in one birth.
The Semitic numeral is based on a root *θmn-, whence Akkadian smn-, Arabic ṯmn-, Hebrew šmn- etc.
The Proto-Indo-European reconstruction *oḱtṓ(w)- itself has been argued as representing an old dual, which would correspond to an original meaning of "twice four".
However, the digit for eight used in India in the early centuries of the Common Era developed considerable graphic variation, and in some cases took the shape of a single wedge, which was adopted into the Perso-Arabic tradition as ٨ (and also gave rise to the later Devanagari form ८); the alternative curved glyph also existed as a variant in Perso-Arabic tradition, where it came to look similar to our digit 5.
In these digits, the line of the 5-like glyph used in Indian manuscripts for eight came to be formed in ghubār as a closed loop, which was the 8-shape that became adopted into European use in the 10th century.
[9] The Ammann–Beenker tiling is a nonperiodic tesselation of prototiles that feature prominent octagonal silver eightfold symmetry, that is the two-dimensional orthographic projection of the four-dimensional 8-8 duoprism.
It has eight triangular faces alongside eight vertices that forms a cubic faceting, composed of two self-dual tetrahedra that makes it the simplest of five regular compounds.
The special unitary group SO(3) has an eight-dimensional adjoint representation whose colors are ascribed gauge symmetries that represent the vectors of the eight gluons in the Standard Model.