A surface whose plane sections are all either ellipses or circles. A football approaches being an ellipsoid as does a discus.
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In two dimensionscircles look like spheres. Any uniform polyhedron with a large number of sides looks something like a sphere.A sphere is a special case of an ellipsoid (where the three axes are equal), so ellipsoids can look like spheres. Another special case of ellipsoids is called a spheroid (where two axes are the same).
There are different formulae for spheres, ellipsoids, cones and pyramids, paralellepipeds as well as some other shapes. For other shapes, including irregular shapes, the fluid displacement method may be the only option.