Active vocabulary. Pattern is the repetition of shape or form

Pattern is the repetition of shape or form. It can also reflect the underlying structure of a design by organizing the surfaces or objects in the composition. There are many different kinds of patterns:

• Flowing: A flowing pattern is based on the repetition of an undulating line, and reflects a natural meandering through a composition.
• Branching: A branching pattern is the repetition of forking lines, or patterns of deviation. These kinds of patterns can be found in almost all plants, and in many other places in the natural world.
• Spiraling: A circular pattern, or a pattern that winds in and around itself.

The pattern is a form, template, or model (or, more abstractly, a set of rules) which can be used to make or to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the pattern. Pattern matching is the act of checking for the presence of the constituents of a pattern. The detection of underlying patterns is called pattern recognition. The question of how different patterns emerge is accomplished through the work of the scientific field of pattern formation. Patterns are also related to repeated shapes or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of the series. Some patterns (for example, many visual patterns) may be directly observable through the senses.

Some patterns are named. Simple decorative examples are stripes and zigzags. Further examples include the regular tiling of a plane, echoes, and balanced binary branching.

The simplest patterns are based on repetition/periodicity: several copies of a single template are combined without modification. For example, in aviation, a " holding pattern" is a flight path which can be repeated until the aircraft has been granted clearance for landing.

Pattern recognition is more complex when templates are used to generate variants. For example, in English, sentences often follow the " N-VP" (noun - verb phrase) pattern, but some knowledge of the English language is required to detect the pattern. Pattern recognition is studied in many fields, including psychology, ethnology, and Computer Science.

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