A gable is the triangle formed by the two angles of a roof. If you're asked to draw a house, this is probably what you'll draw. For the sake of simplicity, this house with a front gable has its front door facing the street.

 

Cross gable roofs have at least two gable rooflines that intersect. This house has a more complex floor plan than the plain gable house, which is rectangular. It doesn't matter where the front door is, although it's usually on the street side.

 

Many barns have gambrel roofs, where the top part of the roof has less of a pitch than the bottom part. It is also typical of colonial Dutch architecture.

 

The hip roof has four sloped sides that meet at the top and stand up to hurricane winds better than a gable roof. The "hip" is the angle formed where two sloped sides meet. It is used with many different architectural styles, often on smaller buildings such as garages and pool houses.

 

This style is also known as Pavilion Hipped or Pyramid Hipped.

 

This looks like a gable roof with the top chopped off. The Mansard roof has a flat or nearly flat pitch on the top, with a steeper pitch on the four sides.
 
The Mansard roof is named after the Frenchman, Francois Mansart (1598-1666), who first conceived it. It became popular in the mid-19th century in France during the reign of Louis Napoleon, so it is sometimes called "Second Empire Mansard". It was adopted in England and the United States during the Victorian era.
 
 The Mansard is often built from slate, but architectural shingles are used as well. It is efficient because it allows the attic to be used as a separate floor without adding substantially to the height of a building.
 
Usually a Mansard will have dormer windows, but for the purpose of demonstration, this dowdy little cottage has a Mansard roof with a high ceiling inside.

 

Naturally there's always an exception to any rule. For instance, a bonnet roof is like a gambrel roof, except that the footprint of the top part is long and narrower than the gambrel.

 

I threw some dormer windows into this picture. Normally they would match the roof style, but I was feeling adventurous.

 

The saltbox house was popular from 1650 to 1830. It was shaped like the wooden saltboxes in Colonial times.
 
The roof is similar to a side gable on a 2-storey house, but reaches farther down on the opposite side to make a 1-1/2-storey house.
 
When a house was enlarged in the old days, the pitch of the roof on the addition was sometimes less steep than that of the roof on the original house so that people could stand up in the addition.
 
It's an efficient roof, most often built so that the long side without windows is toward the wind. Often used in New England, the saltbox roof allowed snow to slide off during the winter, and most of the windows faced south.

 

Read about this style house on the Colonial page.

 

Here's a round roof, too.

You can curve one or more parts of a roof or build any fancy configuration you (or architects through the ages) can imagine. See a couple of my experiments in Paint Shop Pro here.