Where does the word “data” come from ?

• Data is the plural of the Latin word: “datum”
• The term was first coined by the British cleric Henry Hammond in 1648 but at the time “heaps of data” was out of context.

• In the current of data as being “facts and figures about a population of interest”, this term was used by used in the 18th century by Priestley, Newton and Lavoisier.
• The mathematicians Gauss and Laplace laid the mathemtaical foundations for the statistical methodology

Reference: Big Data: A very short introduction by Dawn E. Holmes. Oxford University Press, 2017