Math

How to spell math

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce math

What does math mean?

1. nounThe study of numbers, quantities, shapes, and the relationships between them.

Math in a sentence

• She tutors high school math three evenings a week.

• The accountant did the math and found a small error in the totals.

Where does math come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a shortened, informal form of mathematics, which travelled into English through Latin mathematica from the Greek mathematike (tekhne), meaning 'the art of learning' or 'the science of knowledge'. The deeper root is the Greek verb manthanein, 'to learn', and the related noun mathema simply meant 'that which is learnt', so the very oldest sense was knowledge in general rather than numbers specifically. As the Greeks treated arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as the model subjects worth studying, the word narrowed to the study of quantity, structure, and space. English adopted the full word in the 1500s, and the clipped form math appears from the late 1800s in North American usage, while British speakers preferred maths because the original word ends in an 's'. The single 'th' makes it an easy and stable spelling.

How the word is built

• math (clipped from mathematics, from Greek mathema: that which is learnt)