Catenary

Catenary is a big word that describes the shape of something that's hanging or sagging under its own weight, like a cable or a rope. Imagine you have a long piece of string and you hold it by both ends. If you let go of one end, the string will droop down in the middle, making a gentle curve. That curve is the shape of a catenary.

The neat thing is that this shape is found all over the place in nature and engineering. Bridges, power lines, and suspension cables are often designed using the catenary shape to make them strong and stable. It's kind of like how a tent is designed with a curved shape so that it can hold its weight and not collapse.

So if you ever see a cable or a rope that's drooping down in a nice curve, you can tell your friends that it's making a catenary shape because of gravity and physics!