In vertebrate anatomy, hip (or "coxa" in medical terminology) refers to either an anatomical region or a joint.

The hip region is located lateral and anterior to the gluteal region (i.e., the buttock), inferior to the iliac crest, and overlying the greater trochanter of the femur, or "thigh bone". In adults, three of the bones of the pelvis have fused into the hip bone or acetabulum which forms part of the hip region.

The hip joint, scientifically referred to as the acetabulofemoral joint (art. coxae), is the joint between the femur and acetabulum of the pelvis and its primary function is to support the weight of the body in both static (e.g. standing) and dynamic (e.g. walking or running) postures. The hip joints are the most important part in retaining balance. The pelvic inclination angle, which is the single most important element of human body posture, is mostly adjusted at the hips.

Pain of the hip may be the result of numerous causes including nervous, osteoarthritic, infectious, trauma-related, and genetic ones.

In geometry, the hexagonal prism is a prism with hexagonal base. This polyhedron has 8 faces, 18 edges, and 12 vertices.

Since it has eight faces, it is an octahedron. However, the term octahedron is primarily used to refer to the regular octahedron, which has eight triangular faces. Because of the ambiguity of the term octahedron and the dissimilarity of the various eight-sided figures, the term is rarely used without clarification.

Before sharpening, many pencils take the shape of a long hexagonal prism.

As a semiregular (or uniform) polyhedron

If faces are all regular, the hexagonal prism is a semiregular polyhedron, more generally, a uniform polyhedron, and the fourth in an infinite set of prisms formed by square sides and two regular polygon caps. It can be seen as a truncated hexagonal hosohedron, represented by Schläfli symbol t{2,6}. Alternately it can be seen as the Cartesian product of a regular hexagon and a line segment, and represented by the product {6}×{}. The dual of a hexagonal prism is a hexagonal bipyramid.

Hip is a slang term sometimes defined as fashionably current, and in the know. It has also been defined as "an attitude, a stance" in opposition to the "unfree world", or to what is square, or prude.

Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing.

Origin of term

The term hip is recorded in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the early 1900s. In the 1930s and 1940s, it had become a common slang term, particularly in the African-American dominated jazz scene.

Research and speculation by both amateur and professional etymologists suggest that "hip" is derived from an earlier form hep but that is disputed. Many etymologists believe that the terms hip, hep and hepcat derive from the west African Wolof language word hepicat, which means "one who has his eyes open". Some etymologists reject this, however, tracing the origin of this putative etymology to David Dalby, a scholar of African languages who tentatively suggested the idea in the 1960s, and some have even adopted the denigration "to cry Wolof" as a general dismissal or belittlement of etymologies they believe to be based on "superficial similarities" rather than documented attribution.