“Digits are fingers — Latin digitus meant a finger or toe, and our ten-digit number system is named for the ten fingers on which humans have counted since before written language.”
Latin digitus meant finger or toe — specifically, a finger used for pointing, counting, or measuring. The digitus was also a unit of length: approximately three-quarters of an inch, the width of a finger. From digitus came digitalis (of the fingers, relating to fingers) and eventually digital — anything that could be counted or represented with fingers.
The connection between fingers and numbers is ancient and universal. Almost every human counting system began with the ten fingers — the decimal system's base of ten is not a mathematical necessity but an anatomical one. Cultures on every continent independently developed base-ten counting because humans have ten fingers. The body was the first calculating machine.
The mathematical digit — a numeral from 0 to 9 — entered English from Latin digitus through the counting-on-fingers origin. Medieval mathematicians used digit specifically for single-figure numbers. When calculating with the abacus or in written columns, a digit was one finger's worth of number: a single unit of the place-value system.
Digital, meaning of or relating to digits or fingers, acquired its modern technological meaning in the 20th century when electronics could represent information as discrete values (0s and 1s) rather than continuous quantities. The digital revolution is, at root, a counting revolution — everything reduced to the same discrete units our ancestors counted on their fingers. The ancient Latin finger is now the bit.
Related Words
Today
The digital revolution is a renaming of everything as numbers — every image a grid of pixels, every sound a sequence of samples, every text a string of encoded characters. At the bottom of all of it are the digits: 0 and 1, the two states that electronics can reliably maintain. The counting that began on ten fingers has been compressed to two.
When you tap a touchscreen, you are using your digits to interact with a system named for digits. The Latin body part has made a complete journey: from flesh to metaphor to the invisible infrastructure of modern life.
Explore more words