datum

The Latin word datum means 'something given,' from the verb dare, 'to give.' In Roman legal and philosophical discourse, a datum was a fact granted for the sake of argument — not discovered, not measured, but conceded. The plural, data, entered English in the 1640s through scientific writing, keeping that sense of 'things given' as starting points for reasoning.

The shift was slow. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, data still meant premises — the known quantities in a mathematical problem, the assumed facts in a philosophical debate. Euclid's geometry had 'data': given angles, given line lengths. Isaac Newton used the word in the Principia (1687). The data were what you started with, not what you ended up with.

The computing revolution broke the word open. In 1946, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC project began using 'data' to describe the raw input fed to electronic machines. Within two decades, the word had shed its philosophical weight entirely. Data was no longer what a scholar conceded. It was what a machine consumed.

By the 2000s, data had become a mass noun in popular speech — 'the data is' rather than 'the data are.' Pedants still insist on the plural. The rest of the world moved on. The word that once meant a generous act in argument now means the raw material of surveillance capitalism. The giving has become the taking.