What Are Kites?

Kites have two pairs of equal-length adjacent sides, and perpendicular diagonals

Kites are four-sided shapes with two separate pairs of congruent (equal-length) adjacent sides. The angles where these pairs meet are also congruent—take a look at the drawings down below.

A kite looks like two isosceles triangles joined at a common base, but facing opposite directions. A kite also looks like a triangle joined with its reflection (mirror image) over a side of the triangle. The diagonals of a kite will always be perpendicular.

The angles where the equal-length sides meet are unrelated. Unlike in parallelograms, none of the sides in a kite need to be parallel.

In the image below, all the blue shapes are kites. The red shape is not a kite, though it is a parallelogram. Notice how diagonals AC, FH, GI, and PS are all lines of symmetry for their kites (but BD and QR are not).

Area:

You can find the area of a kite by multiplying the lengths of the two diagonals then dividing by $2$. In other words, by using the formula $\frac{\text{diagonal A}\times\text{diagonal B}}{2}$.

Relationships to other quadrilaterals:

Squares are kites where all the sides are an equal length and all the corners form right angles.