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Crescent
shape that resembles the moon before it reaches the first-quarter lunar phase, or after it passes the last quarter. / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Crescent (disambiguation).
In art and symbolism, a crescent is generally the shape produced when a circular disk has a segment of another circle removed from its edge, so that what remains is a shape enclosed by two circular arcs of different diameters which intersect at two points (usually in such a manner that the enclosed shape does not include the center of the original circle).
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Ottoman_crescent_%28fixed_width%29.svg/220px-Ottoman_crescent_%28fixed_width%29.svg.png)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Gibbous-Crescent-half-ellipse-in-circle.svg/320px-Gibbous-Crescent-half-ellipse-in-circle.svg.png)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/%D9%87%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84_%D8%B1%D9%85%D8%B6%D8%A7%D9%86.jpg/640px-%D9%87%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84_%D8%B1%D9%85%D8%B6%D8%A7%D9%86.jpg)
The crescent was long used as the symbol of Byzantium. Now it is the main symbol for the religion Islam.