Number & MeasureGreek → English
Trigonometry
/ˌtrɪɡəˈnɒmɪtri/noun
The branch of mathematics dealing with the relations between the angles and sides of triangles.
The Greek roots
τρίγωνον
trígōnon
triangle
μέτρον
métron
measure
Literally: “triangle measuring”
The story of the word
Bartholomaeus Pitiscus put the coinage on a title page: Trigonometria, 1595, assembled from τρίγωνον and μέτρον. An English translation carried the word over in 1614. The Greeks had the mathematics centuries before the name, though Hipparchus and Ptolemy worked with chords of a circle rather than sines, which came later from India through Arabic.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1614
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
geometrypolygondiagonalsymmetry
In a sentence
You can survey a field with a tape, two stakes and enough trigonometry to be dangerous.