Author: Melissa / Source: Today I Found Out
Travis T. asks: Why do Americans say “math” and other English speaking countries say “maths”?
Aluminium or aluminum, zee or zed, and removing u’s from certain words or not- among the many discrepancies between American and British English, perhaps none conjures as much religious fervor as math vs.
maths.So which one is correct?
Well, really neither is technically more correct than the other. It’s all just language and conventions different groups of people want to use. At the end of the day, language is all about communicating effectively and the rules that surround it are meant to serve that end, not language serving the rules and conventions, contrary to what many an individual who refuses to accept the evolution of language might otherwise try to have you believe.
As nobody is likely to get confused at all what someone is saying when they say math or maths and saying one or the other is the accepted way to do it among two rather large groups of English speakers, the idea of saying one is definitively right and one is wrong is a little rich.
But that’s not terribly interesting. So let’s stoke the fires a bit and see if we can’t shed some light on how this particular difference between American and British English came to be.
To begin with- which was first, math or maths? It turns out, while you’ll often read that the math lovers of the world win this one, this isn’t actually correct, though it is true that even in the UK it’s not been until the last half century or so that saying maths was more common than math.
But to start with, Math. as an abbreviation for mathematics dates back to at least as early as June 4, 1847 where W.G. Hammond wrote in his diary “It rained so that we had a math. lesson indoors.”
Again, it is commonly stated that Maths is a later invention, first attested to in 1911 in a letter from English soldier and poet Wilfred Edward Salter Owen where he wrote, “The Answers to Maths. Ques. were given us all this morning.”
It is next seen again after this in 1917 in a September edition of Wireless World with “Extremely ‘rusty’ in ‘maths.’”
However, it turns out there is a much earlier known instance of someone writing maths, interestingly, occurring in America. In his Letter from the Secretary of War written by War Secretary John C. Calhoun in 1818, a man referred to as “Chs. Davies” is listed as “ass. prof. maths.”
There is also a third variation of this popping up in 1836, where it states, “Edward C. Ward, Prof. of Math’s”
“Math’s” also appears in The Merit Roll of the Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, published sometime around 1854. It turns out one T.C. Rice and P.H. Worhsam were, to quote, “Deficient in math’s.”
(No doubt had they known over a century and a half later they’d be called out on this in a very public way and it would be all anyone would ever remember of them, they would have studied harder.)
In any event, in these cases, the apostrophe simply functions as the placeholder for the missing letters between the math and the “s”.
It should be noted here that in all these early variations of math, maths, math’s, it’s not thought people actually pronounced the abbreviations this way, instead just using it as a short hand way to write mathematics, which would then be spoken fully, similar to how you’d say “Professor” rather than “Prof” when encountering the abbreviation “Prof.” as in the previous example.
It wouldn’t be until around the mid-20th century that it appears people actually started to use math and maths as proper spoken words, rather…
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