Did you know that algebra and algorithm are not only related, but both derived from a (mangled) translation of a mathematician? Yep!

In the 9th century, a Baghdad scholar named Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote a famous treatise on mathematics that introduced Arabic numbers and computing to the West for the first time. In honor of him, these ways of working with numbers were named after him…in a way. Medieval Latin used algorismus for this “system of computation,” which was their bad translation of al-Khwarizmi. Over the centuries, algorismus eventually became algorithm.

Similarly, algebra (also joining the language in the medieval days) was influenced by this same name, altered slightly to reflect the Arabic al jabra, which means “reunion of broken parts.” By the 1550s, it meant “formal mathematics; the analysis of equations.” It wasn’t until the 17th century that the pronunciation became AL-gebra; until then, it was the more Arabic-influenced al-GEB-ra.

How do you stand with algebra? Love it? Hate it?

My daughter asked me a few weeks ago why a last name is called a surname. I had no idea…but of course declared, “Word of the week!” and promptly looked it up. 😉

And it’s both straightforward and not. Sur is Latin for “above,” so the original meaning of surname was “an epithet, name, or title”–as in, something tacked on to one’s name. Think Catherine the Great or Sir William, Esquire. It began being used in that sense in the 1300s. But it only took about a hundred years for surname to be applied to family names instead of just titles or epithets.

I found it quite interesting to learn that family names came to the English world first among the Norman nobility in the 12th century. Commoners had begun to adopt the tradition a century later, but it began in the south of England and was slower to catch on in the north.

Do you know what your surname means or where it came from?

It’s summertime in the northern hemisphere, our kids are out of school, so many of us are thinking about one of our favorite things…VACATION! But have you stopped to wonder about the history of the word? I actually first took a look at it back in 2012, but it was definitely time for a revisit!

I was pretty surprised to learn that this word is as old as it is! It strikes me as a modern idea, I suppose . . . or maybe I just tend to think of the British word “holiday” as being older.

I actually first looked at the etymology of motivation back in 2012, but…that’s been a long time ago, LOL. And since summers can be a weird time of either little motivation or super-charged motivation, I figured it was a great time to revisit.

We all know what an infant is–a newborn baby. Pretty simple. What I didn’t realize was that it actually comes from the Latin in meaning “not” and fari meaning “to speak.” So it literally means “unable to speak.” Who knew? Historically, infant in Latin meant a babe in arms, but then in languages like French and Italian it got applied to all children, hence the French enfant, which just means “child” and the Italian fanciullo.

It’s interesting to note too that historically in English, the word could be applied to any child as well, usually up to about age 7. The word came into use in English in the 1300s, and while the age range has changed over time, the general meaning hasn’t. It’s also worth noting that the Germanic words from which we get child also used to mean “a newborn.”

You know how I often begin these posts by telling you about how my family was talking about this or that word, and I guess as to how it evolved, and I was right? Yeah…not the case this time at all. 😉

As it turns out, delight has nothing to do with light, as I was trying to guess. 😉 It’s actually from the French delitier, which is in turn from the Latin delectare, both of which mean “pleasure, charm, that which satisfies.” And that Latin probably looks pretty familiar, right? We also get words like delectable and delicious from the same root. Delight is just a variation of those, and both the noun and verb entered English way back in the 1200s…but was spelled delite for hundreds of years, until the 16th century.

Why the change to -ight? Well that is owed to the influence of words like light, flight, night etc. It’s solely an attempt to use a uniform spelling of a sound and has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the word it then looks like. Go figure!