During the creation of a 3-dimensional vector in C++ I was wondering what to call the third dimension, if the first two were called rows and columns.

2D Vector Initialization

To begin, a 2D vector would be initialized like the following:

int rows = 3;
int columns = 5;
int initVal = 0;

// 2 dimensional vector
vector<vector<int>> vec2D(rows, vector<int>(columns, initVal));

All fine and dandy! Let’s look at three dimensions…

3D Vector Initialization

Initializing a 3D vector gets more complicated:

int rows = 3;
int columns = 5;
int dim3 = 2; // what should I name this?!
int initVal = 0;

// 3 dimensional vector
vector<vector<vector<int>>> vec3D(rows, vector<vector<int>>(columns, vector<int>(dim3, initVal)));

Names for the 3rd Dimension Vector

What should we call dim3?

A few things came to mind:

  • layer
  • plane
  • depth
  • time
  • aisle (like a grocery store)
  • page (pages in book 📖)
  • sheet (Excel, similar to page)
  • slice (bread 🍞)
  • stack (stack of books 📚)
  • strata (rock layers)
  • floor (building 🏢)
  • tier

Aisle sounds fitting the theme of rows and columns.

MATLAB refers to the 3rd dimension as page. I like page because its something I can think of in the physical world, but other applications could use different words!

int rows = 3;
int columns = 5;
int pages = 2;
int initVal = 0;

// 3 dimensional vector
vector<vector<vector<int>>> vec3D(rows, vector<vector<int>>(columns, vector<int>(pages, initVal)));

Good luck! 🌠