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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

A healthy mixture was always preferred in maths and science. This is occasionally taken to extremes; the name reverse transcriptase, an enzyme used by retroviruses, is a combo of English, Latin and Greek!

Arabic is also popular, particularly in maths.

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> Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device.

―C. P. Scott

Is it? I can only think of (the very frequently noted) ‘algebra’ and ‘algorithm’.

Also ‘zero’, and ‘cipher’ (which, oddly, derive from the same word). And ‘average’. There are a few of them.

Interesting. I'm not sure we can really call these arabic-derived, though. They do seem to ultimately trace back to fairly unrelated arabic words, but their first use in mathematics (much later) seems to have come in the form of a mixture of words from European languages. The two examples I gave seem to be more legitimately Arabic in origin.

Not math but I just learned alkali is the word for "ash" in Arabic.

And “alcohol”, frequently consumed at science and math conferences

"Alcohol" has a very interesting etymology, too.

As others have said, there are a few celestial terms that come to mind:

  - azimuth
  - zenith
  - nadir

Also some chemistry terms, again just from top of brain, might be wrong:

  - alchemy
  - elixir
  - arsenic
  - alkali

Nadir always seemed very obviously Arabic to me. Weirdly, I first encountered it in a book on category theory, and only after that did I start to hear it used in everyday English to mean the opposite of 'apex'.

It's the opposite of zenith, another word ultimately derived from Arabic.

The difference between an apex and a zenith is that an apex exists as a point in space, while a zenith is a direction, with no fixed point which may be said to be "the" zenith. There are other differences given that apex has a few related meanings, but this is the main one.

Ah, yes. I knew it wasn’t quite the right word.

Sofa!

Dolphin, music (from muse), logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, pharmacy, angel, comedy, drama. The list of Greek loan words that are shared by many European languages goes on and on

Edit: I think almost every word with "ph" in it is from Greek and "th" in languages other than English.

They're asking about Arabic loanwords.

If you add all Latin words with Greek origins, most European languages are really forms of Greek

azimuth is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head

You'll find "zenith" at your feet.

You're thinking of nadir, also Arabic. The zenith is in the opposite direction.

Gah! So much for my wit.

The sheriff says "hold my beer".

A funny false or convergent etymology - shire reeve not sharif.

Here's another false trail from a real conversation:

  Q: What US state's name comes from the title of an Arabic ruler?

  A: Al Abama?

Of course, the correct answer is California from Khalifa transliterated through a Spanish novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Las_Se...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calafia

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