Resembling or shaped like a fan; spreading outward from a central point in a radiating pattern.
Compound of 'fan' and '-like' (Old English 'gelic'). This descriptive term has been used since at least the 17th century in botanical and architectural descriptions.
The fanlike pattern appears everywhere in nature—peacock feathers, ginkgo leaves, nautilus shells—and it's not random; it's an optimization principle in physics called 'radial stress distribution' that nature discovered millions of years before engineers!
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