oddity

Old Norse oddi meant the point of a triangle, particularly the third corner that creates an uneven number. Viking navigators used oddi to name a point of land jutting into water, a geographical feature visible from the sea. The word also named the arithmetic situation of an odd number: two plus one, where the final unit has no pair. From this geometric and numerical sense came the broader meaning of something that does not fit the expected pattern.

Old Norse oddi entered Middle English as odde or odd somewhere in the fourteenth century, appearing in English texts referring to odd numbers in arithmetic, the count that breaks the symmetry of pairs. The shift from number to strangeness happened gradually: odd numbers are irregular, they disrupt expectation, and by the late sixteenth century English speakers were using odd to describe people and things that similarly broke the expected symmetry. An odd fellow was a fellow with no matching pair, an outlier in the arithmetic of belonging.

The English suffix -ity (from Latin -itas) converted the adjective into an abstract noun. Oddity appeared in print around 1713, in the journals and essays of early eighteenth-century London, where writers describing coffee-house culture needed a word for the category of peculiar persons and things they encountered. Alexander Pope used oddity in the 1720s to describe eccentrics in polite society. The word arrived at exactly the moment when the English reading public developed an appetite for observing human peculiarity as a form of entertainment.

Today oddity names both the quality of being strange and a particular strange thing, carrying its double function from the coffee-house era. David Bowie named his 1969 song Space Oddity with precise etymological awareness: an oddity is something that does not pair up with the familiar world. The word still contains the Old Norse triangle inside it, that third point with no matching corner. Strangeness, it turns out, was always just arithmetic.