There’s an etymological reason why calculations with an abacus can leave paper and pencil in the dust.

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Before the invention of pocket calculators most people did calculations with a paper and pencil. Some people found this too time consuming and invented the slide-rule.

I actually was pretty good with a slide rule many decades ago; I won a competition. I don’t know if you can buy a slide-rule in too many places any more.

Another tool to hasten and manually automate arithmetic calculations is the abacus.

Wikipedia tells me that abacuses (or abaci) have been in use for between four and five thousand years.

Slide-rules came into being only a few decades after Shakespeare and are a recent enough invention that we can even attribute names to the people who contributed to their invention.

But while the slide-rule came and went the abacus has endured. It’s still evidently in common use in Africa and the Far East.

It’s pretty clear why a slide-rule is called a slide-rule but it’s not so obvious that the same principles* were at work behind the naming of the abacus.

These days an abacus looks like a frame with wires or rods inside along which slide little beads. However, long ago the ancestor of the abacus was a board or table covered in sand into which were drawn little furrows that beans could be moved back and forth in.

Less portable perhaps, and not so quick, but hey, calculators and slide-rules were still thousands of years in the future.

This use of a board or table to work on explains why the Latin word grew from a Greek word abak or abax that meant “slab” or “board.”

But the Greek word may have come from a Hebrew word that referred not to the board but to the sand on top of it. Abaq meant “dust” in Hebrew.

I associated the invention of the slide-rule with the lifetime of William Shakespeare and although neither of author is cited as having used the words I might as well associate the first appearance of the word abacas to Geoffrey Chaucer; he was 44 years old when abacas first appeared on an English page.

*see comment at baby