digit: [15] Digit was borrowed from Latin digitus. This meant ‘finger or toe’, but its underlying etymological sense is probably ‘pointer’; it appears to come from an Indo-European base *deik-, which also produced Latin dicere ‘say’ (originally ‘point out’), Greek deiknúnai ‘show’, Sanskrit di?- ‘show’, and possibly English toe.
The word was used in classical times for a measure of length, a ‘finger’s breadth’, but the mathematical sense ‘a(chǎn)ny of the numbers from 0 to 9’ (originally as counted on the fingers) is a later development. Digitalis [17], the scientific name of the ‘foxglove’, is a modern Latin use of the Latin adjective digitālis ‘of the finger’, perhaps in allusion to the foxglove’s German name fingerhut ‘thimble’, literally ‘finger-hat’. => toe
digit (n.)
late 14c., "numeral below 10," from Latin digitus "finger or toe" (also with secondary meanings dealing in counting and numerals), related to dicere "tell, say, point out" (see diction). Numerical sense is because numerals under 10 were counted on fingers. The "finger or toe" sense in English is attested from 1640s.
雙語例句
1. Australia had 15 years of double-digit inflation.
澳大利亞有15年通貨膨脹率維持在兩位數(shù)。
來自柯林斯例句
2. Her telephone number differs from mine by one digit.
她的電話號(hào)碼和我的只差一個(gè)數(shù)字。
來自辭典例句
3. The computer can multiply two 10 - digit numbers in 1 / 1000 second.