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

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