What the words meant

Mathematicians kept their words and changed what they meant. Each lane is one word, split wherever its meaning changed. Pick a year and every word below reads the way it did then.

Every word as someone who knew the mathematics of that year would have used it, with the question each one answers differently over time.

Years mark the first use in each sense that we know of, or the first that mattered; “c.” marks one that is only approximate. Older senses rarely vanished on the date shown, and for decades both were in use. Sources: Jeff Miller’s Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics, the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, and the works named in each entry.