I haven’t taken a math class since probably 1977 or '78, the last year I was required by my high school to do so. It was Algebra II/Trig, as I recall, and I passed it by the skinniest skin of my teeth.
Still, the study of numbers had always been referred to as “math,” a non-count noun much like “water,” “beef” or “rice.” I fancied that there was a vast ocean of mathematics somewhere and that any cupful of it I might encounter was understood to still be part of that same vast body of numbers.
In the last two or three years, I’ve noticed reference to “maths.” Most recently, this was in an issue of the magazine The Economist. Had it occurred on its own, I would have written it off as a quirky difference between UK and US English, but it seems to pop up regularly enough that I should really ask the esteemed regulars on this board:
[ul]
[li]Is “maths” the standard way of referring to the study of mathematics?[/li][li]Has this been the case all along and I just started to notice it around 2010-ish? (I left a media-related career in 2009 to teach English overseas, so a lot of my points of reference encountered a rather sudden shift. I also had neurosurgery shortly after arriving in Korea, which is probably unrelated, but that represented a pretty major shift for me as well, so it’s worth mentioning.)[/li][li]If “math” is the singular form, to what does it refer? Is Arithmetic one distinct math and Geometry another?[/li][/ul]
“Maths,” short for “Mathematics,” which is plural even in US English, has been a quirky difference between US and UK English for at least at least thirty years, and I’d guess forever.
“Mathematics” is not a plural. Neither is linguistics, statistics[sup]1[/sup], logistics, etc. The Brits just like to use unnecessary “s” sounds. Like how they think “dice” is a singular noun.
[sub]1. when referring to the area of study as a whole.[/sub].
Apropos of nothing but this american thinks nothing of shortening mathematics to math and economics to econ but statistics could never be stat. If there’s a rule governing this shortening, it’s not an immediately obvious one.
“Maths” is the standard abbreviation for “mathematics” in British English (and many other variants of the language). It’s singular. (“Maths is my favourite subject.”)
The final ‘s’ may come from the final ‘s’ in “mathematics”. There’s no rule which says abbreviations have to come from the start of a word, and there are plenty of counter-examples - “ltd” for “limited”, “rd” for “road”, “Penna” for “Pennsylvania”, etc. Alternatively, the final “s” may be an informal diminutive, as it is in abbreviations like “Babs” for “Barbara”, “Pops” for father or grandfather, etc.
I found a few older texts that abbreviated mathematics as math’s with the apostrophe denoting that a part of the word had been deleted, as one sees in the infamous fo’c’sle. It could be that over time the apostrophe simply got dropped and then it was merely a habit to retain the -s in the abbreviation.
Great list; I’d add “TWP” for “Township,” although both the word and its abbreviation appear to have little use or meaning outside New York and New Jersey.
Oh, there’s countless examples, many but not all from the world of officialdom and bureacracy. In no particular order:
tld = townland
ct = court
bp = bishop
abp = archbishop
cdl = cardinal
acct = account
admon = administration
admor = administrator
assn = association
mr = mister
dr = doctor
MS = manuscript
pt = part
That’s partly because abbreviations are frequently constructed by omitting vowels, which makes the resulting configuration difficult to pronounce as a spelled word. But there are examples of pronounceable abbreviations on this model. Inner Stickler has already given us “stats” for “statistics”. And there’s “Chas” for “Charles”.
It’s got very little to do with what we like or how we think (as if that were monolithic). it’s just a part of the prevailing local culture - something that humans absorb and adopt, pretty much without conscious choice or preference, wherever they live.
“Dice” as a singular noun, with plural either “dice” or “dices”, is found in English from the fourteenth century. I don’t think we can call it an error any more.
Back in the days of handwriting only, pre-typewriters, it was fairly common to abbreviate a word by using the first part and last part: Jas for James, say, or -tn for -tion. Happens a lot in old manuscripts.
