Question No. 1 - Why does No. mean number?

Question

We all use it eg No. 17 Smith Street, Part No. 1747 etc etc...

Number consider Number has no O in it (<---- see) why do we call it No.?

Answer 1

From the latin numero

Answer 2

It's short for the Italian 'numero', meaning 'number'.

Why Italian ? I'm not sure - maybe it has something to do with the fact that, in the middle ages, many of the foremost mathematicians were Italian. And it was through the Italians that we acquired our present Arabic system of numbers that have gradually replaced the Roman ones.

Incidentally, in Russian, they also use N°, although the letter N doesn't even occur in the Russian alphabet. (To get the sound N in Russian, they use a letter that looks like a capital H .)

P.S. Note to Fretting Not: The French have two different words that correspond to the English 'number'. There is numéro, meaning serial number (e.g. telephone number, house number) and for which the abbreviation is No. and there is nombre, meaning quantity, which has no standard abbreviation.

P.P.S. Maybe Husky88 is right and it doesn't come from Italian. But she cheated - she looked it up in a dictionary !

Answer 3

Numerology is any belief in divine, mystical or other special relationship between a number and some coinciding events. It's an occult science that I consider fascinating. I started to study numerology because of my obsession with Mathematics, Geometry. What I discovered it's really incredibble.

The best site you can visit is http://numerology.toptips.org

(go there and ask for your free personalized report)

Answer 4

"no." is not based on the English word "number." It means 'number', but like many of our most common abbreviations --such as etc., i.e., e.g., viz.-- it is based on a LATIN word, the word "numero". (This practice of using Latin abbreviations is a holdover from a time when English scholars wrote in Latin.)

Thus, this abbreviation is formed by using the first and LAST letter of the word.

Actually, the basic form of the word in Latin "numerus". "Numero" is the "ablative case" form. The ablative form was used here because that fit the usage English writers needed when they introduced the form into English in the 17th century (in expressions of the sort "men, in number three").

A couple of notes on this form & how to use it:

1) The numero sign used to always use a RAISED (or "superscript") O. (Typewriters could not handle this very well, unless you wanted to manually move the carriage up and down. But wordprocessing, personal computing make it much easier.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign

This use of a superscript at the end is another indicator that it is the letter stands for the case ENDING, rather than, say, the second letter of the word. (The practice of abbreviating a word by its first letter or two plus the case ending is ancient. For example, in the early church --by the 2nd century-- copies of the Greek New Testament would abbreviate the divine names by using the first letter or two followed by the case ending, with a line over the whole to mark it as an abbreviation.)
http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/NominaSacra.html

2) Even though the abbreviation is borrowed from the Latin, you should never SAY the Latin word when you see it. That's just an unusual habit in English -- to use Latin abbreviations to stand for English words.

In the same way, when you see "e.g." you say "for example"; for "i.e." say "that is", for "viz." say "namely"; for "cf." say "compare"; and for "etc." say "and so forth". (Many other European languages have equivalent abbreviations, but base them on their OWN language.)
See: http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19971217
and list - http://list-of-latin-phrases.area51.ipupdater.com/

Answer 5

Etymology:
Middle English nombre, from Anglo-French, from Latin numerus
Date:
14th century
It comes from "nombre" for sure. But I don't know if this is the reason they abbreviate it like that.
The origin is Latin, then Anglo-French by Webster Dictionary. Not other languages and etc.

Answer 6

It's actually number order

so No.5 is number order 5

Answer 7

it is suppose to be written N0. the o is a 0 but most have got into the habbit of using as you wrote.

Answer 8

Well the french spell number as nombre. So maybe we adopted the french abbreviation.

Answer 9

Just short for number.

Answer 10

Short for numero, Latin origin.