Mono is 1, Stereo is 2, what is 3?

Cellphone cameras have moved from a single lens to a dual lens arrangement in recent years and the next iPhone is rumored to have three. There’s “Monoscopic” vision, “Stereoscopic” vision, but what’s the word for “3-scopic” vision? Answer The words ‘triscopic’ and ‘triscopy’ appear in the heading of a scientific paper and in the text … Read more

Why are two-digit numbers in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726) written in “German style”?

I have been reading “Gulliver’s Travels” (Otherwise known more verbosely as “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships”), and I have noticed that two-digit numbers are often written in the “German” style, that is it say that the … Read more

Is there a name for all numbers different than zero?

The names for the number 0 include “zero”, “cipher”, “null”, “naught”, “nought”, “love”, “duck”, “nil”, “nada”, “zilch”, “zip”, “o”, “aught”, and “ought”. There are various subtleties of usage amongst them all. Wikipedia Ok right. 0 has a lot of name. I am looking for a word to name a number or a group of number … Read more

When to use ‘the amount of’ and not e.g. ‘increase physical exercise’ / ‘increase the amount of physical exercise’?

When do you need to use the number of or the amount of with a noun? For example, “If people go to gyms more, they will increase their physical activity.” OR “If people go to gyms more, they will increase their amount of physical activity.” “The number of CO2 emissions dropped last year.” “CO2 emissions … Read more

Is this an acceptable way of writing the count of items in a sentence?

My father served in the logistics branch of Indian armed forces and he had a very particular style of representing the number of items of a certain object. For example, he would use this sentence: Confirming the receipt of footballs (20 nos) and volleyballs (10 nos). OR Confirming the receipt of footballs (20 numbers) and … Read more

Beginning list items with numerals

Most well-known style guides dictate that numbers should always be spelled out at the beginning of a sentence (Forty-seven percent of people…), even to the point of recommending rewriting to avoid spelling out awkwardly large numbers (In all, 5,260 people…). I have a bulleted list of percentages in which I would really like to start … Read more

How do ordinal suffixes work with mathematical constants and other non-Arabic numbers?

This question was inspired by a tweet from the FakeUnicode Twitter account, a semi-novelty account sharing various examples in the wild of bugs, glitches and other unintended results from improperly implementing the Unicode character encoding standard. What are the English ordinal suffixes of various mathematical constants and concepts? Is it always -th? πᵗʰ 𝑒ᵗʰ ℎᵗʰ … Read more