As unlikely as it may seem, the digitalexamination and the digital computer sharea linguistic ancestor: digitus, the Latin wordfor finger. It is the descendent of an Indo-European root meaning ‘to show’, fromwhich we also get such words as indicate andindex. Time and technology have obscuredthe ancestral line from the ten fingers to thedecimal counting system and ultimately tothe ones and zeros forming a binary number,which employs only one of the nineArabic numerals but is nevertheless said tocomprise a series of digits. The word, finger,comes from a root meaning five, which alsobegat penta in Greek and quintus in Latin.
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