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Let's say we have two sequences A and B of differently coloured but equally big marbles.

  • If A has fewer marbles than B, we say that A's length is smaller than B's, and we would say that A is shorter than B.
  • If A has more marbles than B, we say that A's length is larger than B's, and we would say that A is longer than B.
  • But what single-word, non-hyphenated adjective do we have for the length being equal, meaning A is as long as B?

I can only think of multi-word phrases like "equal-length" or "same-length" or "equally sized" or "equal-size" and so on. Equidistant comes to mind, but that means equally apart rather than equally long, and I don't think equilongial is a thing. In any case, it is not correct to just use "equal" or "equivalent", because as opposed to two straight lines of the same length, two sequences of marbles can have the same length and still be very unequal in their contents.

There is only one similar thread on the same topic, but it is not about comparatives (shorter vs. longer) but positives (short vs. long) with the in-between being "medium". That's evidently not what I want.

For future reference of the comments: the original post mentioned the example of using this (single) word in a software program with existing routines countShorterSequences and countLongerSequences. This was not the main point, because the program's documentation is just in English. I would like to avoid "equal-length" there, since it seems clunky relative to "shorter" and "longer". Compare "this returns a longer, sorted sequence" with "this returns an equal-length, sorted sequence". As with all SWRs, you can always replace the word by an entire phrase ("this returns a sorted sequence of the same length"), but I don't want that.

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    countEquallySizedSequences
    – jxh
    Commented Sep 5 at 15:19
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    I’m voting to close because questions constrained by the limitations of software programming are not on-topic here.
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Sep 5 at 16:04
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    I think you can edit it. Just omit references to computing. Line- and object-length are fine, and sentence-length perhaps in terms of number of words (number of characters becomes rather esoteric, and someone will raise the objections that different characters, dashes etc have different lengths). Note that 'shorter' / 'longer' are usually found as 'shorter/longer than', with usual analogue 'as long as' or 'equal in length to'.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Sep 5 at 18:08
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    OED has the obsolete word evenlong (adj.) with the meaning "Equally long, of the same length."
    – ermanen
    Commented Sep 6 at 11:55
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    I’m voting to close because questions constrained by the limitations of software programming are not on-topic here.
    – Greybeard
    Commented Sep 8 at 10:41

3 Answers 3

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The term equisized can be put to service here.

Of equal size.

Wikitionary

While not a major dictionary, the word does appear in several reference sources, and ngram show some usage starting early last century.

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  • The N-gram comparison between evenlong and equisized and equisize is surprisingly fair too. Any idea if these can be ranked orthogonal to Google N-gram?
    – Mew
    Commented Sep 10 at 1:50
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"Congruent" comes to mind.

MW

congruent. Adjective.

2: superposable so as to be coincident throughout

congruent triangles

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Isometric - "of, relating to, or characterized by equality of measure" (Merriam-Webster)

It is a bit more vague than requested, because strictly speaking, the "measure" doesn't have to be length but come on! What other measure would you care about in a series? Width? Depth? :)

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