ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Parallelohedron

Okay, so imagine you have a bunch of blocks with straight sides, like the kind you use to build towers or castles. Now let's say you stack them up on top of each other so each one is right on top of another. This would give you a tower shape, right?

Well, if you kept stacking the blocks so that they were all next to each other in a straight line, you would eventually make a long shape. This shape would have straight sides and flat faces just like the tower shape, but instead of going up and down it would be a flat shape.

This is what we call a parallelepiped. It's basically a long, flat shape made out of stacked blocks. Now, imagine you have two of these shapes and you put them next to each other so that their flat faces are touching. You can imagine that each shape looks like a box with a lid that can be opened and closed.

When you put them together, it's like you're putting two boxes with their lids open next to each other so that they create a bigger box with no lid. That bigger box is called a parallelohedron. It looks like a cube, but instead of having squares for faces, it has rectangles or parallelograms.

So, to summarize: A parallelohedron is a shape made out of two or more parallelepipeds that are put together to form a bigger box with rectangular or parallelogram faces. It's basically like stacking and connecting a bunch of boxes to make a different shape.