Odd/Even

Filed Under April 2007, columns 

Level-headed.

Dear Word Detective: The desperate urge to find out the origins of words often creeps up on me, but I can usually work it out myself with the help of dictionaries or your excellent column. However, it recently it suddenly crossed my mind (as it does) that I didn’t know why odd and even numbers were called that. “Even,” OK — smooth, level, equal, etc. — but “being divisible by two” didn’t seem to come up with “even.” And as for “odd,” there’s nothing odd about 3, 5 or 7, any more than 2, 4 or 6, they are just as useful. And, oddly, there is no etymology for “odd” in my dictionaries. Can you help? — David, Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.

So, you’re saying there’s something odd about “even”? “Odd” seems quite a bit odder than “even” to me. Not as odd as otters, of course. Then there are the woodchucks chucking. It’s a wonder I ever get any work done around here. But I dare you to stare at “odd” for a while and not begin to wish you spoke some other language. It’s a seriously weird little word.

Before we get too far into this question, I should explain that I do not understand mathematics. Period. I once had a moment of absolute clarity in ninth grade when I thought I finally understood trigonometry. But the moment lasted all of fifteen minutes, and I’ve been abysmally innumerate ever since. This is relevant because explaining “odd” and “even” necessarily involves a smidgen of math.

Both “odd” and “even” are extremely old words. “Even” harks back to the ancient Germanic root “ebnaz.” It’s not known whether that root meant “equal, the same” or “flat or level,” the two primary meanings of “even” today, but when “even” first appeared in Old English, it carried the primary sense of “level, not sloping.” The application of “even” to numbers as the opposite of “odd,” oddly enough, dates only to the middle of the 16th century. The sense is that an “even” number of things, divided by two, would create two equal amounts with no difference — no slope, so to speak — between them.

“Odd” comes from the old Scandinavian root meaning “triangle,” which led to the Old Norse “oddi” having the sense of “three” (as in sides of a triangle), which evolved into a word applied to an “extra” element added to a pair or the “odd man” who might break a tie vote. The mathematical meaning comes, again, from division by two, which in the case of an “odd” number, results in one being left over and the two parts not being “even.” The use of “odd” to mean “strange” or “unusual” stems from this sense of an “outsider” that doesn’t neatly fit in.

 

 

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