Etymon #47
Kendrick's arithmetical symbol
The word entered English from Old French in the late fourteenth century. Its earliest recorded sense was an arithmetical symbol. It arrived with the Arabic numeral system. Adelard of Bath, an English scholar who had travelled through North Africa and the Arab world, translated mathematical texts from Arabic into Latin around 1120, bringing Arabic numerals to Western European scholars.
It travelled from Sanskrit into Arabic, from Arabic into Medieval Latin, and from Medieval Latin into Old French before reaching English. The Arabic word entered Medieval Latin in two forms. One gave English this word. The other came through Fibonacci's Liber Abaci of 1202 and gave English a different word entirely.
In Arabic the root word meant empty. It was itself a translation of the Sanskrit śūnya, the word Hindu and Buddhist philosophers used for the void. Behind the Sanskrit lay a Proto-Indo-European root meaning hollow. The same ancient root may also lie behind the Latin word for a hollow space, which gave English its words for cave and cavity.
ZERO and ALGORITHM share the same ancient sources. ZERO came from the Arabic root, entering English through a different Medieval Latin form. Fibonacci used it in his 1202 book, which brought Arabic numerals to a wider audience across Western Europe. ALGORITHM came from the name of the ninth-century Arabic mathematician al-Khwarizmi, whose work on calculation gave medieval scholars their first systematic methods for arithmetic.
By the early fifteenth century the word's meaning had shifted to include any numeral. By the 1520s it shifted again, to a style of writing. Shakespeare used a related sense in King Lear in 1606, calling a fool 'an O without a figure', a nothing. During the Second World War the word became the focus of Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park. Today it also names a circle of hip-hop performers. The BET Hip Hop Awards has staged the format annually since 2006, with Kendrick Lamar delivering one of its most celebrated performances in 2013.
Six letters.
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