A high-schooler in Indianapolis, Indiana, wonders why the word number is abbreviated as no. when there’s no letter O in the word. The answer lies in the Latin word numero, which is the ablative form of the Latin word for number, numerus. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Do We Abbreviate “Number” as “No.”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Vivian. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.
Welcome, Vivian. What can we do for you?
I had a question. Why is the abbreviation for the word number, which is spelled N-U-M-B-E-R-N-O, if the letter O isn’t anywhere in the original word?
Oh, so you’re thinking maybe it should be N-U instead of N-O as an abbreviation, huh?
Right? I mean, like, probably.
It’s part of a set of abbreviations we have that are basically older than English, or at least modern English. It goes back to the Latin form of the word number. One form of it was numero, very much like in Spanish and Italian today, N-U-M-E-R-O. And Latin scribes abbreviated a lot of their writing, and the way that they abbreviated that word was N-O, with a little mark, or maybe the raised O with a line above it to indicate that the word had been shortened. And so that’s it.
So we’ve just kept that Latin abbreviation through the millennia.
Oh, wow. That’s so cool.
Yeah, and there’s a few others like that. Pound is a classic example of that, like the weight LB for pound.
Yeah, yeah.
And the original Latin word is numerous, but that particular case, the ablative case, means in or with.
Yeah, we don’t really have cases in English in that way, so it’s kind of lost on us, but yeah.
Oh, cool. Thank you for telling me.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Take care. Bye.
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