skor

Skor is Old Norse for a notch or a cut mark, from the verb skera (to cut). Norse and Germanic peoples counted by cutting tally marks into sticks or bones, and every twentieth notch received a deeper or larger cut to mark a completed set. The number twenty and the cut that marked it became the same word. A score was twenty because twenty cuts filled a tally stick.

English borrowed the word during the Danelaw period, when Old Norse heavily influenced the English spoken in northern and eastern England. By the thirteenth century, 'score' was a standard English word for twenty. Sheep were counted by the score. Debts were recorded by the score. The Exchequer used tally sticks — notched wooden rods split in half, one for each party — well into the nineteenth century. The scored stick was a receipt.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in 1863 begins: 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation.' Four score and seven is eighty-seven — 1863 minus 87 equals 1776. Lincoln used the archaic phrasing deliberately. The speech was written to sound biblical, and the King James Bible used 'score' for twenty throughout: 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten' (Psalm 90:10).

The score as a number is now archaic in ordinary speech. Nobody says 'a score of eggs' when they mean twenty. But the word lives in other meanings: the score of a game, a musical score, to score a point, to score a surface. All trace back to the same Old Norse cut. The game score is a tally. The musical score is a set of marks on a page. The surface score is a literal scratch. Every meaning is a version of the original notch.