When you log into your computer you don’t suspect that typing your password has anything to do with the trunks of trees, but it does.

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The origin of logging-in comes from filling out a daily log book.

Starting about three hundred years ago a log book was the document into which the captain of a ship wrote the important aspects of the day’s proceedings.

The most important of these were the ship’s progress across the face of the deeps.

In those days there were no GPS systems and it is from the relatively crude approach to making these calculations that we get several important words.

I don’t know what I would have done to calculate my surface speed without instruments but here’s what they did.

Every so often they took a chunk of wood tied to a string and tossed it overboard. Depending on how fast the string played out they could calculate their speed.

That chunk of wood was called the log although over time it was engineered into becoming a board designed to stand vertically in the water and resist movement from the cord pulling on it.

From this floating piece of carpentry came the term for documenting progress and eventually the term you use to describe typing in your password at a computer.

Another great word from this practice of ship-borne logging comes from the method used to calculate the length of string the log pulled out.

The sailor tossed the log and turned one of those timers that works by trickling sand through a glass. The string that played out had knots tied in it at regular intervals and he counted the number of knots that went by during the time it took for the sand to run out.

It was just a happy coincidence that the Old English word knot meaning “the tied part of a rope,” sounds the same as the Greek word for “sailor.”  Thus the speed of a ship is measured in knots.