Number & MeasureGreek → English
Biometrics
/ˌbaɪəʊˈmɛtrɪks/noun
The measurement of bodily characteristics, either as statistics on living populations or as a means of identifying individuals.
The Greek roots
βίος
bíos
life
μέτρον
métron
measure
Literally: “measurement of life”
The story of the word
Two senses share the word. Galton, Pearson and Weldon founded the journal Biometrika in 1901 for the statistical study of variation in populations, and that discipline still calls itself biometry. The security sense, fingerprints and iris scans, grew from the same measuring impulse but points at one person rather than a distribution.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
biologybiographygeometrysymmetry
In a sentence
The border gate reads biometrics from a passport chip and a camera.
His paper applies biometrics to shell thickness across four colonies.