Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definitions: Abacus |
AbacusNoun1. A tablet placed horizontally on top of the capital of a column as an aid in supporting the architrave. 2. A calculator that performs arithmetic functions by manually sliding counters on rods or in grooves. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "abacus" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1374. (references) |
| Domain | Definitions |
Computing | A device for performing calculations by sliding beads or counters along rods. An early(3000 B. C. )form of biquinary calculator. Source: European Union. (references) |
Literature | Abacus A small frame with wires stretched across it. Each wire contains ten movable balls, which can be shifted backwards or forwards, so as to vary ad libitum the number in two or more blocks. It is used to teach children addition and subtraction. The ancient Greeks and Romans employed it for calculations, and so do the Chinese. The word is derived from the Phoen. abak (dust); the Orientals used tables covered with dust for ciphering and diagrams. In Turkish schools this method is still used for teaching writing. The multiplication table invented by Pythagoras is called Abacus Pythagoricus. (Latin, abacus). Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Mathematics | A counting frame made of wire and beads. Source: European Union. (references) |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
An abacus is a counting frame, typically wooden with balls sliding on wires. It was first used before the adoption of the ten-digit Arabic numeral system and is still widely used by small merchants in China.
The Roman abacus contains seven long and seven shorter rods or bars, the former having four perforated beads running on them and the latter one. This figure of a Roman abacus is taken from an ancient monument:
The bar marked 1 indicates units, X tens, and so on up to millions. The beads on the shorter bars denote fives,--five units, five tens, etc. The rod O and corresponding short rod are for marking ounces; and the short quarter rods for fractions of an ounce. Computations are made with it by means of balls of bone or ivory running on slender bamboo rods, similar to the simpler board, fitted up with beads strung on wires, which has been employed in teaching the rudiments of arithmetic in English schools.
The swanpan (算盤 or 筭盤 Pinyin: suan4 pan2) of the Chinese closely resembles the Roman abacus in its construction and use.
The Chinese abacus is usually around 20 cm (8 inches) tall and it comes in various width depending on application, it usually has more than seven rods. There are two beads on each rod in the upper deck and five beads each in the bottom. The beads are usually round and made of hard wood. The abacus can be reset to the starting position instantly by a quick jerk along the horizontal axis to spin all the beads away from the horizontal beam at the center. The beads are counted by moving them up or down towards the beam.
Chinese abacus has functions other than counting. Unlike the simple counting board used in elementary schools, very efficient suanpan techniques were developed to do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cubic root at high speed.
See also: Counting rods
The beads and rods were often lubricated to ensure speed. When all five beads in the lower deck are moved up, they are reset to the original position, and one bead in the top deck is moved down as a carry. When both beads in the upper deck are moved down, they are reset and a bead on the adjacent rod on the left is moved up as a carry. The result of the computation is read off from the beads clustered near the separator beam between the upper and lower deck.
In a sense, the abacus works as a 5-2-5-2 based number system in which carries and shiftings are similar to the decimal number system. Since each rod represents a digit in a decimal number, the computation capacity of the abacus is only limited by the number of rods on the abacus. When a mathematician runs out of rods, he simply adds another abacus to the left of the row. In theory, the abacus can be expanded infinitely.
As recently as the late 1960s, abacus arithmetic was still being taught in school, as in Hong Kong; and into the 1990s in Taiwan. When handheld calculators became popular, schoolchildren's willingness to learn the use of the abacus decreased dramatically. In the early days of handheld calculators, news of abacus operators beating electronic calculators in arithmetic competitions in both speed and accuracy often appeared in the media. The reason for this was that early electronic calculators were often plagued by rounding and overflow errors. While most handheld calculators can only handle 8 to 10 significant digits, the abacus is virtually limitless in precision. Inexperienced operators might contribute to the loss too. But when the functionality of calculators improved, most Chinese realized that the abacus could never compute higher functions -- such as those in trigonometry -- faster than a calculator. The older generation -- mostly those who were born before the early 1950s -- still used the abacus for a while, but electronic calculators have gradually displaced the abacus in Hong Kong over the past four decades. Nowadays, as calculators have become more affordable, the abacus is hardly seen in Hong Kong. Abaci are, however, still being used in China and Japan. The slide rule has also suffered a similar demise.
The swanpan is closely tied to the Chinese "Hua1 Ma3" numbering system.
The Japanese eliminated one bead each from the upper and lower deck in each column of the Chinese abacus, because these beads are redundant. That makes the Japanese soroban (十露盤) more like the Roman abacus. The soroban is about 8 cm (3 inches) tall. The beans on a soroban are usually double cone shape.
Many sources also mentioned use of abacus in ancient Mayan culture.
The Mesoamerican abacus is closely tied to the base-20 Mayan numerals system.
Abaci are still used by individuals who have visual impairments. They use an abacus to perform the mathematical functions multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square root and cubic root. A piece of soft fabric is placed behind the beads so that they don't move inadvertently. This keeps the beads in place while a person feels the beads or uses the abacus.
See also:
Roman abacus
Chinese abacus
Beads
Decimal system
Modern decline in use
Miscellanea
Japanese abacus
Native American abacus
Uses by the visually impaired
External Links
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Abacus."
| The following table is compiled from various sources, across various languages. When English abbreviations or acronyms come from a non-English source, this is noted. | |||
| Entry | Source | Expression | Field |
ABACUS | English | Autonetics Business and Control United Systems | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |||
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Numeration | Abacus, logometer, slide rule, slipstick, tallies, Napier's bones, calculating machine, difference engine, suan-pan; adding machine; cash register; electronic calculator, calculator, computer; |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Abacus |
| English words defined with "abacus": Abaci, Abacist, Abacus harmonicus, Abacuses ♦ Boultin ♦ Coussinet ♦ echinus, Epistyle ♦ Schwanpan, Swanpan ♦ The Liberty Bell. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "abacus": biquinary notation. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "Abacus" is also a word in the following languages with English translations in parentheses. Danish (abacus, ball-frame, counting-frame), Dutch (abacus, ball-frame, counting-frame), Latin (abacus, buffet), Manx (abacus). |
| Domain | Title | ||
References |
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Books |
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Periodicals |
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High Tech |
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| "Abacus" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 85.71% of the time. "Abacus" is used about 42 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 85.71% | 36 | 57,479 |
| Noun (proper) | 11.9% | 5 | 157,705 |
| Noun (plural) | 2.38% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 42 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| Country | Name | Country | Name |
| South Africa | Abacus Technology Holdings Limited | United Kingdom | Abacus Group Plc. |
| USA | Abacus Direct Corporation | ||
| (more examples...) |
Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.
Expression using "abacus": Abacus harmonicus. Additional references. | |
| Hyphenated Usage | |
Beginning with "abacus": abacus-for-brains. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
abacus | 793 |
history abacus | 27 |
abacus astrology | 26 |
abacus mortgage | 24 |
chinese abacus | 23 |
use an abacus | 23 |
abacus law | 23 |
abacus software | 21 |
abacus restaurant | 21 |
picture of an abacus | 20 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Language | Translations for "abacus"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Afrikaan | abakus (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Albanian | abak, panel mozaike, numërator. (various references) | |
Arabic | طبلية تاج. (various references) | |
Bulgarian | вид сметало. (various references) | |
Chinese | 算盤 , 算盘 (Abaci, Abacuses). (various references) | |
Czech | poèitadlo. (various references) | |
Danish | abacus (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Dutch | abacus (ball-frame, counting-frame), telraam (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Esperanto | abako. (various references) | |
Farsi | چرتکه , لوحه مربع موزاءیک سازی , گنجه ظرف , تخته روی سرستون[معماری]. (various references) | |
Finnish | abakus. (various references) | |
French | abaque, boulier. (various references) | |
German | Rechenbrett, Abakus (abacuses, ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Greek | άβακας, αβάκιο. (various references) | |
Hebrew | חשבו י" (counting frame), אבקוס. (various references) | |
Hungarian | abakusz (ball-frame, counting-frame), oszlopfõlap, golyós számológép. (various references) | |
Icelandic | taknagrind (ball-frame, counting-frame), reiknigrind (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Indonesian | sepoa. (various references) | |
Italian | abaco (abac scale, ball-frame, counting-frame, ready-reckoner), pallottoliere (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Japanese Kanji | 算盤 , 十露盤 . (various references) | |
Japanese Katakana | そろば". (various references) | |
Korean | 주판 (Abaci, Abacuses). (various references) | |
Manx | abacus. (various references) | |
Norwegian | kuleramme. (various references) | |
Papiamen | teleram (ball-frame, counting-frame), tèlram (ball-frame, counting-frame). (various references) | |
Pig Latin | abacusay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | ábaco. (various references) | |
Romanian | abacã, abac. (various references) | |
Russian | монограмма (monogram), абака (abaca), абак. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | računaljka. (various references) | |
Spanish | ábaco (abac scale). (various references) | |
Swedish | kulram. (various references) | |
Turkish | abaküs, sayı boncuğu, sütun başlığı. (various references) | |
Ukranian | рахівниця, абака. (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Latin | 500 BCE-Modern | abacus. (various references) |
| Classical Hebrew | 200 BCE-Modern | abaq. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "abacus": abacuses. (additional references) | |
| |
"Abacus" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: aacs, abaccus, abaco, abacu, abakas, Abanu, abaqus, Abashum, abbaccus, abbacus, abces, Abecor, Abekas, abicus, Abihu, abocus, Abracos, abscuss, acabus, Acaus, aeacus, Agaces, Aiakos, albacom, Amacis, Asakusa, babassu, bacau, baccus, Bacus, Baracus, Barcus, Baucis, Jabavu, Salbakos, tabacum. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "abacus" (pronounced a"bukus) |
| 3 | -k u s | amicus, carcass, caucus, circus, coccus, crocus, discus, focus, fracas, hocus, locus, markkas, mucous, mucus, Orcas, raucous, refocus, ruckus, streptococcus, viscous, yarmulkes. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-a-b-c-s-u" | |
-1 letter: scuba. | |
-2 letters: abas, baas, cabs, casa, cubs, scab, suba. | |
-3 letters: aas, aba, abs, baa, bas, bus, cab, cub, sab, sac, sau, sub. | |
-4 letters: aa, ab, as, ba, us. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-a-b-c-s-u" | |
+1 letter: aucubas, sambuca. | |
+2 letters: abacuses, banausic, causable, labrusca, macumbas, sambucas. | |
+3 letters: ambuscade, backhauls, carnaubas, sauceboat, subapical. | |
+4 letters: abundances, ambulances, ambuscaded, ambuscader, ambuscades, barracudas, huckabacks, sauceboats, scarabaeus, subaquatic, subclavian, subglacial, trabeculas, ultrabasic, unbalances, unscalable. | |
+5 letters: acetabulums, ambuscaders, ambuscading, barracoutas, beauticians, blackguards, bureaucrats, lumbosacral, outbalances, purchasable, subcapsular, subclavians, ultrabasics, unescapable. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)41 62 61 63 75 73 |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references).- -... .- -.-. ..- ... |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01000001 01100010 01100001 01100011 01110101 01110011 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)A b a c u s |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)0041 0062 0061 0063 0075 0073 |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)356867698785 |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Commercial 4. Images: Slideshow | 5. Usage Frequency 6. Names: Company Usage 7. Expressions 8. Expressions: Internet | 9. Translations: Modern 10. Translations: Ancient 11. Abbreviations 12. Acronyms | 13. Derivations 14. Rhymes 15. Anagrams 16. Orthography | 17. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
