The story
- Latin · borrowed fromscālāris
- English todayscalar
Borrowed from Latin scālāris, adjectival form from scāla (“a flight of steps, stairs, staircase, ladder, scale”), for *scadla, from scandere (“to climb”); compare scale. The mathematics sense was coined by Irish mathematician and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton in 1846.
Words from the same roots
Latinscālāris all →
scalary
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.