Oriana, a biochemistry professor in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, uses aliquot for a chemical solution divided into equal portions. The verb works for the dividing, and the noun for each portion, whether it’s sodium chloride in a lab or, more loosely, soup set aside for lunches. The Latin pieces behind aliquot point to other and how many, relatives of words such as alien, alias, quota, and quotient. In piano construction, aliquot scaling uses extra strings tuned to vibrate sympathetically with the struck strings, adding richness to the sound. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Aliquot” Is Not a Hybrid Fruit, It’s a Word for Equal Portions”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Oriana Fisher calling from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Hey, Oriana.
Hi, Oriana.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Great to talk to you.
Good.
How are you?
I’m a biochemistry professor, and I was hoping that you could answer some questions that I have about a word that I use a lot at work that I’ve recently discovered isn’t actually known by most people in the English language, and the word is aliquot.
Aliquot. It’s not a fruit that grows on a hybridized tree.
No, no.
Tell us how it comes up in your work.
So at work, we use it to talk about like if we have a stock of something and we want to portion it out into equal pieces to save for later.
We use it both as the verb describing like the act of making these individual portions of the thing, as well as the noun describing each of the portions.
So if I had like a solution of sodium chloride and I wanted, I don’t know, like 50 milliliters of it and I wanted to make smaller fractions of it, I would say that I’m aliquotting it.
And then if I wanted to use one of those fractions, I would also call the fraction an aliquot of the thing.
So it would be an exact fraction.
So it would be 5, 10 milliliters of the…
Right, exactly.
Okay.
And so that’s A-L-I-Q-U-O-T, aliquot.
Mm—
Do you ever use it kind of generically just to mean just a small sample or small portion that’s not equal to other samples or portions?
Maybe occasionally.
I also, like, have started using it.
I didn’t quite appreciate that it was only a science word, so I’ve started using it sometimes when I’m cooking.
Like if I make a big pot of soup, I’ll say like, oh, I’ll make aliquots of this and use it for lunches later in the week.
And there it’s probably not equal portions, but it’s the same concept.
Yeah, it’s such a great scientific word that really should leap into places like cooking or home carpentry or crafts at school.
Or dividing a brownie between two kids.
Perfect.
Exactly.
Perfect use of it.
Aliquot.
Biochemistry is a great use of it.
Obviously, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and even land and water use planning, where they’re talking about dividing lots up into aliquots.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah.
And you’ll often find when people are doing things like taking air samples or water samples, they’ll take one large sample and then they’ll divide it up into aliquots.
So each one of these aliquots can be tested in a different way for different kinds of, say, pollutants or different kinds of substances or different kinds of bacteria, that sort of thing.
And then there’s one thing I really love, which I did not know until I looked at this.
You know, aliquot scaling is something I learned about.
Aliquot scaling involves extra wires above the normal wires in a piano.
What?
Oh, wow.
They’re tuned in such a way that they vibrate in sympathy with the strings below, the ones that are actually struck by the hammers.
They’re like, I think, roughly an octave above.
And so it’s amazing.
I didn’t know such a thing existed, but apparently it gives us like a magnificent sound.
So when did this word end up coming into at least like scientific terminology?
It’s a new Latin term as I understand it.
Really connected to a couple of obvious words in English.
The alias and quat.
The alias part means other.
And we find it in words like alien and alias.
Alias, of course, meaning another name.
Or alien meaning another kind of being.
And then quat, Q-U-O-T, means how many or so many.
And it’s related to quota and quotient, both words which tell you how many of something.
Fantastic, right?
So it’s really kind of perfectly connected to other parts of our language that come through our romance language roots.
Okay.
Oriana, thank you so much for the conversation.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
I love your show.
It was great talking with you.
Oh, you’re a delight.
Thanks, Oriana.
Call us again sometime, okay?
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
