Origins of the words minute, second and hour
Channel: Words
Date: 31/07/2018

Have you ever wondered how our units of time - minutes, seconds and hours - got their names?

Let’s start with minutes: The word minute comes from the Latin 'pars minuta prima' or 'first small part', meaning the first unit that’s smaller than an hour. Its relationship to ‘minute’ is obvious.

Obviously you can divide an hour by an even smaller unit. In Latin, they called this pars minuta secunda - the second smallest part - which is where the word "second" comes from.

An even smaller unit, the "third", which is one ​60th of a second, used to be a thing, and it remains in some languages, like Polish and Turkish, although seconds are almost always divided by decimals these days.

As for why hours and minutes are divided into 60ths, it’s because ancient Babylonians had a mathematical system based around the number 60.

That brings us to hour. I wish I could tell you, as a lot of sources do, that the word hour comes from ‘hore’ meaning whore, because that was roughly the time you’d spend with a prostitute. You might’ve heard that, and it might be the reason you’re watching this video, but from what I can tell, it’s a myth. 

Hour does come from ‘hore’, which was in Old French, and ‘hora’ in Latin and Greek, but they didn’t mean prostitute - they meant … one twelfth of a day. Sorry.

Words is an etymology project.