The herringbone pattern is the most popular form of parquet flooring, first developed in the Roman era as the perfect arrangement for road building. Romans discovered the roads were more stable when the bricks were laid in the herringbone pattern. It was first used in flooring back in the 16th century and remains just as popular today. The pattern is called herringbone due to its visual similarity of the bone structure of a herring fish. It’s a type of pattern made up of rectangles at right angles to one another, creating a staggered zig-zag design.