496: score Apr 17, 2016

Anyone familiar with the French grading-system or counting-system will know that French maths are not base-10 such as is the English custom, but base-20. It might seem then that the word 'score, such as in "four score and seven years ago" must be of French origin, mais non. The modern noun and verb go back to the Old English 'scoru' which denoted a ‘set of twenty,’ and is derived of the Old Norse word, 'skor' meaning ‘notch, or tally", usually of twenty.

442: algebra Feb 23, 2016

Algebra: complicating and seemingly never-ending, not so different from its etymology. The word is from late Middle English via Italian, via Spanish, via medieval Latin, from the Arabic 'al-jabr' meaning ‘the reunion of broken parts,’ as in ‘bone setting’. The original sense was ‘the surgical treatment of fractures’. The mathematical sense comes from the title of a book, " ʿilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala" which means ‘the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like,’ written by al-Ḵwārizmī. In summation, broken limbs are not so distinct from math.

376: -ty Dec 19, 2015

Everyone learns the number system in preschool and kindergarten, and in comparison to certain other languages (like French) the number system is relatively easy. After the first nine numbers, the larger units (hundreds, thousands) are counted by simply putting a number in front. Decades, and teens are both irregular and due to Old English forms of ten. Fourteen, for example is four+tīen, and the 'ty', or in Old English, 'tig', is another form used for groups of tens.

369: Ascending -illion (numbers) Dec 12, 2015

Numbers are naturally infinite, but words are not, i.e. they come from somewhere. Everyone knows, 'million', and 'billion', but not everyone knows–or would like to memorize–numbers that are conceptually difficult. Nevertheless there is a relatively simple rule to figure these cardinal numbers out. After 'million', which comes from the Latin word for 'thousand', 'mille' and then the suffix 'one', we have the next new number, 'billion' from the prefix 'bi' meaning two'. After that, 'trillion' is the third new number from the prefix, 'tri' meaning 'three', and then 'quadrillion' from 'quad' and so on with 'quintillion', 'sextillion' and 'septillion' &c.