“What’s your phone no.?”
“I live in apartment no. 44.”
Huh?
There is no ‘O’ in number, so why does it get abbreviated ‘no’? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be ‘nu,’ or ‘nm’ or something else that has letters contained in the actual word?
Number comes to Modern English from the Middle English word nombre. This may not explain it, but comes close enough for me.
According to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition, the word ‘number’ derives from the Middle English nombre by way of the the Latin numerus; so, it appears possible that the abbreviation was in common usage before the parent underwent phonetic readjustment.
KneadToKnow,
If i could actually type at a rate exceeding 2wpm, i probably wouldn’t be so prone to be your 6 minute echo…
Regards,
Thanks, #. I’ve been feelin’ pretty invisible lately in GQ.
On a somewhat related note, we call that octothorpe symbol a Hash (a term the Us keep for the percent sign, for some reason) and it is used in place of the term “Number” sometimes.
Thanks for the clarification, GuanoLad. I was starting to get confused.
The abbreviation is for Italian numero**. First and last letter in a word was once used to make abbreviations. The French, even though they have their own word nombre, still use the Italian word (they spell it numéro).