If you raise a number to its second power, you have the square of the number. If you raise it to the third power, you have the cube. I’m pretty sure most people know that. But here’s an obscure bit of trivia: if you raise a number to its eighth power, what you have is the “zenzizenzizenzic” of the number.
Although it surprises even me, I’m not kidding. And “zenzizenzizenzic” is not some word made up in the twentieth century because of a math professor’s child. That bit about the child, of course, comes from the word “googol”, which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. it was named by the US mathematician Edward Kasner in 1920, and he got the name from his 9-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta. But “zenzizenzizenzic” is a great deal older.
It all goes back to 1557, when the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde published “The Whetstone of Wit”. Although today a book with a title like “The Whetstone of Wit” would probably be funny, Recorde’s book was about math. In the 1500s math was more difficult to express than it is today because many of the conventions we use to communicate things as simple as 2+2=4 just didn’t exist. The plus sign, minus sign, and equals signs, for example, were first published in “The Whetstone of Wit”.
Another problem they had was expressing exponents. Today when we want to mean “the square of five” we find it pretty basic to write 5^2 (or to use typography, when possible, to make the “2” smaller and raise it up a half space), but back in Recorde’s day there wasn’t a consistent way to do this. Recorde introduced a normalized process for what we call exponents. He called a factor of two a “zenzic” and a factor of three a “cubic”. He also included some references to prime numbers for some reason; if you had a prime number that appeared in a sequence of factorization it was called a “sursolid” — one of a sequence of them. Thus 5 was the “first sursolid”, 7 was the “second sursolid”, and so on. He didn’t need to name 3 this way even though it’s a prime number too, because he’d already named that one a “cubic”. Hey I said he introduced the process, I didn’t say his process made perfect sense.
To talk about a number raised to higher powers, you’d just start stringing together the “zenzics” and “cubics” The biggest string Recorde recorded as a word was the eighth power: a “zenzizenzizenzic”. To save on ink, though, he also created a shorthand notation; each zenzic was “z”, and each cubic was “&”. The short form of “zenzizenzizenzic” would be “zzz”, and a “zenziizenzicubic” (a number raised to the sixth power then cubed) would be “zz&”.
Just about all of Recorde’s mathematical terms entered the language — or at least that part of English used in math classes. His book remained an important reference work in math for a long time, even though, being a book written in the 1500s, I wasn’t entirely honest about its title. “The Whetstone of Wit” is just a shorthand notation for it. The real title was “The whetstone of witte, whiche is the seconde parte of Arithmetike: containyng thextraction of Rootes: The Coßike practise, with the rule of Equation: and the woorkes of Surde Nombers”. Until Rene Descartes invented, in 1637, the first version of the exponent notation we use today, math majors could probably remember the whole title — not to mention knowing exactly what a “zenzizenzizenzic” was.
