What are ordinaries?

Ordinaries are simple shapes that help us describe and understand patterns on a flag or a coat of arms, like the colors on your favorite lunchbox or the stripes on your socks.

Imagine you're building with blocks. You have big, simple shapes like rectangles and triangles. These are like ordinaries, they’re the basic, easy-to-see parts that make up more complex designs. On a flag, these might be a cross, a circle, or a stripe.

Think of a knight’s shield in a castle. Instead of having a messy jumble of colors and shapes, it has clean, simple ones, maybe a red canton (a small square at the top) on a white background. That red square is an ordinary, just like the stripes on your pants are simple, repeated shapes that make things look neat.

So, ordinaries are like the blocks or pieces you use to build up bigger pictures, they're the building blocks of design!