The way math papers and proofs are written is fascinating, because it reveals so much about how people read mathematical notation. Much of the older notation was more explicitly used as shorthand for words or phrases, rather than being a language in its own right (as it is today). (And old papers were written out in natural language, which seems so hard to read by today's standards.)

"was" considered?... In French, traditionally, the inequality signs do not include the verb to be; that is how I learned it some 40 years ago. Thus "<" is "plus petit que" although some people nowadays would take it to include the verb to be as in "est plus petit que", mimicking the English usage.

See https://cegepadistance.ca/sous-site/En_route_vers_la_reussit... to see that it is still how it is used in French today.

I still see this, particularly when it would be awkward to create a new symbol: "when the discriminant is ≤ 1". I feel that Halmos [1] wouldn't have liked it, but it does lessen the distance between what is written and the equation the reader will want to have in his mind.

[1] http://www.math.washington.edu/~lind/Resources/Halmos.pdf