abacus

The Abacus, a History

The source of our word abacus, the Greek word abax, is thought to come from Hebrew 'abaq, "dust", although the details of such a transmission are obscure. In postbiblical usage 'abaq meant "sand used as a writing surface".

The Greek word abax has as one of its senses "a board sprinkled with sand or dust for drawing geometric diagrams."

The difference in form between the Middle English word abacus and its Greek source abax is explained by the fact that Middle English actually borrowed Latin abacus, which came from the Greek genitive form (abakos) of abax.

The abacus is the ancestor of the modern calculating machine and computer

The earliest abacus probably was a board or slab on which a Babylonian spread sand so he could trace letters for general writing purposes.

As the abacus came to be used solely for counting and computing, its form was changed and improved.

The sand or "dust" surface is thought to have evolved into the board marked with lines and equipped with counters whose positions indicated numerical values; such as, ones, tens, hundreds, and so on.

In the Roman abacus the board was given grooves to facilitate moving the counters in the proper files while another form, common today, has the counters strung on wires.

The abacus, generally in the form of a large calculating board, was in universal use in Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as in the Arab world and in Asia.

It reached Japan in the 16th century. The introduction of the Hindu-Arabic notation, with its place value and zero, gradually replaced the abacus, although it was still widely used in Europe as late as the 17th century and survives today in the Middle East, China, and Japan.

An expert abacus practitioner can often successfully compete against many modern mechanical calculating machines.

A skilled abacus user, or soroban as it is called in Japan, can perform in a fraction of time, a difficult arithmetic calculation that others could do laboriously only by means of pencil and paper. The Japanese tradesman with his soroban can even outstrip a rapid and accurate Western accountant with his or her electronic adding machine.