Today, during my talk on gene expression analysis at the kick-off meeting of the ERCIM Working Group on Computing & Statistics, I used the phrase giraffe matrix to refer to tall skinny matrices (with more rows than columns) and crocodile matrix for short fat matrices (with more columns than rows). A few hours later, Peter Rousseeuw adopted this terminology in his plenary talk on Algorithms for robust multivariate statistics. As I am writing, a search for these phrases on Google does not match any document.
I want to mention that I did not invent these phrases. I heard the terms matrice girafe, matrice crocodile, and matrice éléphant in 1998 in a course on matrix computations taught by Michel Munster at the University of Liège.
(Can you guess what a matrice éléphant is?)
PA Absil, Geneva, 20 April 2007