Number & MeasureGreek → English
Histogram
/ˈhɪstəɡræm/noun
A chart whose bars show how often values fall into each interval of a range.
The Greek roots
ἱστός
histós
mast, upright, web
γράμμα
grámma
drawing, written mark
Literally: “upright drawing”
The story of the word
Karl Pearson used the word in lectures from 1891 and put it in print in 1895. Which Greek he meant is genuinely disputed: histos, the upright mast, suits the standing bars, while others read the word as a clipping of historical diagram. That same histos, the loom's upright, gives histology, whose subject, tissue, is literally a woven web.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1891
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
histologydiagramtelegramhistogenesis
In a sentence
Plot a histogram before you trust the average; this data has two humps and no middle.