three-dimensional

American  

[three-di-men-shuh-nl, -dahy-] / ˈθri dɪˈmɛn ʃə nl, -daɪ- /

adjective

1. having, or seeming to have, the dimension of depth as well as width and height.

2. (especially in a literary work) fully developed.

   The story came alive chiefly because the characters were vividly three-dimensional.

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three-dimensional British  

adjective

1. of, having, or relating to three dimensions

   three-dimensional space

2. (of a film, transparency, etc) simulating the effect of depth by presenting slightly different views of a scene to each eye

3. having volume

4. lifelike or real

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Other Word Forms

• threedimensionality
  noun

Etymology

Origin of three-dimensional

First recorded in 1890–95

Explanation

Things that have depth and can be rotated in space are three-dimensional. Everything around you that you can touch or move around—your sneaker, your dog, the rug on the floor—is three-dimensional. Dimensionality can be a tricky quality to understand, but it helps to think of a line connecting two points as one-dimensional and a flat plane or shape, like a triangle drawn on paper, as two-dimensional. When you add depth to a shape, you get a three-dimensional object: a triangle becomes a pyramid, for example. When a story or other work of art is so well-made and detailed that it's believable, you can also describe it as three-dimensional.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

three-dimensional

Wang and Zahl analysed the problem on the assumption that the pencil was floating in a three-dimensional space, rather than on a flat surface.

From BBC ● Jul. 24, 2026

Creators now can simply turn still images into three-dimensional videos where their avatars appear to hold or sample products, said Daria Simhony, another affiliate creator.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 15, 2026

Additional testing was performed using three-dimensional tumor spheroid models, which more closely resemble real tumors than standard cell cultures.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 29, 2026

He was celebrated during his lifetime for introducing a new way of painting -- depicting weighty, massive figures in three-dimensional space, while imparting his characters with a human expressiveness not seen before.

From Barron's ● Jun. 12, 2026

So far, to our knowledge, King’s had not built any three-dimensional models of the necessary atoms.

From "Double Helix" by James D. Watson