From the “learn something new everyday” department, an entry in A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia gave me a clue to the derivation of the world “algorithm”, which I had never pondered over before. Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi was a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Bagdad, which was founded in the 800s for the study of Greek philosophy and science. Al-Khwarizmi lived from approximately 780-850. His work on algebra, Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala, gave us the world “algebra”, with “al-jabr” becoming “algebrae” in Latin. He also authored a
treatise on Hindu-Arabic numbers, which had a Latin translation titled “Algoritmi de numero Indorum” or “Al-Khwarizmi on the Hindu Art of Reckoning.” It is that Latin title which gave us the word “algorithm”. (Another spelling of his name is Al-Khowarizmi and there are slightly different spellings of the book titles as well.)