Vivian, a high-schooler in Indianapolis, Indiana, asks why number becomes no. instead of something with a u. The abbreviation comes through Latin numero, an ablative form of numerus, and scribes shortened it with an o plus a mark showing that letters had been left out. Other old abbreviations have similarly sideways-looking histories: ounce traces back to Latin uncia, which became the Medieval Italian onza, and then the source of oz., much as lb. came to abbreviate pound. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““No.” Keeps an “O” from Latin “Numero,” Even as it Abbreviates English “Number””
Well, another Youngsters question got us thinking about the long history of some abbreviations we use today.
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.
And 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.
Oh, cool. Thank you for telling me.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Vivian raised a great question. We take those abbreviations for granted, but then you start thinking, but wait, why do we abbreviate number as N-O or pound as L-B?
But once you know the linguistic roots of those abbreviations, the answer is perfectly clear.
The history is right there.
You know, come to think of it, another example is the abbreviation for the English word ounce.
Ounce comes from the Latin uncia, U-N-C-I-A, which is a unit of measurement.
And this ended up in medieval Italian as onza.
And that word onza was abbreviated as O-Z.
And we borrowed that into English as our abbreviation for ounce, O-Z.
That makes a lot of sense.
I can just see the Italian traders not only giving goods to English speakers, but also language.
Right, all that Italian wine.
Okay.
