If you want to take the square of a number, you “square” it. Easy enough.
If you want to take the square root of a number, you could say you’re going to ‘square root’ it, and most people would understand shoehorning the noun into a verb, but I was wondering if there were anything in math jargon that supplied an easy verb. I didn’t find anything in my M-W under “root” or “radic-” that seemed to apply.
I’m not aware of a short, snappy form. It’s “raising (number) to the 1/2 power”. Some people call it “radical (number)”, but that’s not a verb form.
Whenever I see SQRT in print, in my mind I pronounce it as ‘squirt.’ I don’t know whether it’s ever used as a verb in speech, though.
You can say “take the square root of”.
“root around”
I think that I’ve seen an older source refer to the process of taking a square root as evolution, but I don’t know how common that ever was, or if it referred to anything else as well. Regardless, you’ll probably just confuse people if you refer to evolving a number to get its square root.
[QUOTE]
Is there a verb form for ‘square root?’[/UNQUOTE]
No!
Square Root of 2
Sure, just not for math.
I think the closest you’re going to get is “Take the square root.”
When I was doing homework in college, and we were using lots of square roots, we’d just say “root it”. I always thought it was funny because “root” is slang for copulate. None of my classmates got it.
It’s kind of like, if you use Google to look something up, you “Google it”.
Same sort of thing as Santo Rugger. We’d always just say “take the root”.
May as well take the opportunity to create a new verb right now.
People of the world, I give you: Scroot.
Scroot [skroot] (verb)
To take the square root of.
Okay, that’s done. What’s next?
I must confess I just say “root it”. Not terribly good grammar, but everyone I know understands it, and what is language if it doesn’t evolve a little?
“root it” is not specific as to which root, i.e. square, cube, fourth, etc.
See Post #7.
Square Root of 2 , Cube root of X, 4th root of Y, etc. Math has to be precise.
I support the suggestion of “Squirt” as in SQRT, and I hope it will catch on. Math is always more fun with things squirting!
Right. But, if you’re working with, say, Mohr’s circle, or Pythagoreans’ theorem, or any situation where you’re only going to be doing the square root, and not venturing into nth roots, “root it” will suffice.
If all other root operations are explicitly named, and ‘root’ alone is understood to mean only one kind of operation (square root) - that’s more than adequately precise.
I doubt there’s a verb in English, but other languages possibly have one. Anyone here speak another language where “to take the square root of” is a single word?
If there is such an animal, my money is on it being German or Japanese - in the former, they just glue separate words together to make new ones - in the latter, they import phrases as words.
How about unsquare? Square two to make four. Unsquare four to make two. It’s an assumption, if you like, that a number has been squared already and you need the reverse operation. Uncube works too.
I just say, “square-root”. As in, “Next, square-root the result, and add three.”