An oval is a smooth, rounded shape that looks like a stretched-out circle or an egg lying on its side. If you took a circle and gently pulled it from two opposite sides, you'd create an oval.

You see ovals everywhere: in the shape of a racetrack or the path planets take around the sun. When you draw an oval, your pencil curves continuously without any sharp corners or straight edges, just like when drawing a circle, but the oval is longer in one direction.

Ovals differ from circles because they have two different measurements: they're wider one way and narrower the other. A running track is often called oval-shaped because it gives runners long straightaways connected by curves. Race car tracks like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway are also described as oval, letting cars build up tremendous speed on the straights before navigating the turns.

In geometry class, you might learn that a specific type of oval called an ellipse has special mathematical properties, but in everyday conversation, people use oval to describe any egg-like or stretched-circle shape.