Editing Fallacies of definition (section)

== Incongruity: overly broad or narrow ==
A definition intended to describe a given set of individuals fails if its description of matching individuals is incongruous: too broad (excessively loose with parameters) or too narrow (excessively strict with parameters). For example, "a shape with four sides of equal length" is not a sufficient definition for ''square'', because squares are not the only shapes that can have four sides of equal length; [[rhombi]] do as well. Likewise, defining ''rectangle'' as "a shape with four perpendicular sides of equal length" is inappropriate because it is too narrow, as it describes only squares while excluding all other kinds of rectangles, thus being a plainly incorrect definition.

If a cow were defined as an animal with horns, this would be overly broad (including goats, for example), while if a cow were defined as a black-and-white quadruped, this would be both overly narrow (excluding: all-black, all-white, all-brown and white-brown  cows, for example)<ref name="Potter"/> and overly broad (including [[Dalmatian (dog)|Dalmatians]], for example).