half of decimal; decimal for "decimal point"

[Victor Steinbok]

The first one may be a one-off, but the second is extremely common and
not in OED. "Decimal" (n.) meaning "a number written in decimal
notation" (not just the decimal fraction or "decimals" as a collective)
also is not in OED.

 From an installation blurb for an OpenOffice extension:

http://goo.gl/QOx7U
> This small macro does the same job (even better,
> for fontspacing it uses not only the decimal values,
> but also half of decimal), and you see your changes
> immediately.

After an initial headscratching, I figured that the author meant that
the values were tenths and "half-tenths", i.e., 0.05 steps. Although the
sample figure is a bit fuzzy, that appears to be precisely the case.

Sure enough, under decimal n. B. 1., OED has:

> +1. A tenth part. Obs.
> 1648    Bp. J. Wilkins Math. Magick i. xiii. 89   As a decimall, or
> one tenth.
> 1665    R. Hooke Micrographia Pref. sig. Cv,   And the inches..I
> subdivide into Decimals.
> 1669    S. Sturmy Mariners Mag. iv. iij. 156   If you keep your
> Account by Arithmetick, by Decimals or 10 Parts.

Suddenly, it doesn't seem so obsolete. But there is no corresponding
entry for the adjective.

The closest is A. 1.a.

> a. Relating to tenth parts, or to the number ten; proceeding by tens.

But here "decimal" is broader, as in "decimal notation". It does not
refer to "decimal value" as "one tenth".

A little more digging turns up that the author is from Lutsk (Ukraine),
so it's not clear how functional his ESL is. Still, the distinction is
the same in Russian and Ukrainian: the word for decimal (fraction) is
not the same as the word for a tenth. Even an automatic translator would
have picked it up. (GoogleTranslate gets it correctly in both directions.)

My recollection from teaching days suggests that "decimal" to mean only
the tenths does happen occasionally, particular when referring to tenths
as common fractions rather than decimals. But it's rare and isolated.

However, there is one other "decimal" usage that is clearly /not/ in
OED--the reference to the decimal point (which /is/ in A. 2.),
particularly WRT digits before and after it.

http://goo.gl/EJYrI
> Too many numbers after the decimal when calculating Average. Can you Help?

http://www.mccc.edu/~kelld/decff.htm
> Then to the right of the number in the division box (a whole number
> with an "understood decimal" at the end) add as many zeros to match
> the number of places the decimal was moved on the outside number.
> ...
> To round a number to the nearest tenth (one place to the right of the
> decimal point), compute the number to the hundredths place (two places
> after the decimal) .

http://goo.gl/zok2y
> This holds true both before and after the decimal.
> ...
> 1. Look to see if there is a number to the left of the decimal; if so
> write it out. If there is no number to the left of the decimal, skip
> to step 3.
> ...
> 3. Write out the number to the right of the decimal.
> ...
> 4. Determine the place value of the last digit to the right of the
> decimal.

The last set is particularly telling, because not only is "decimal" used
as both adjective and noun on the page, but "decimal point" alternates
with "decimal" (meaning the same thing) multiple times, and "decimal" is
used in at least three different meanings  (as a noun)--(i) numbers
written in the decimal representation (i.e., representing a number as a
string of digits with a period marking the split between the whole and
the fractional part, a "decimal number"), (ii) decimal fraction (i.e.,
the fractional part in a decimal representation, the "decimal part"),
(iii) decimal point (see above).

(i)
> This decimal is written as one hundred twenty-three thousandths
> ...
> This decimal is written as two hundred forty-five and eighteen hundredths
> Now let's look at writing decimals numerically.
> In this section we will learn to take a decimal stated in words and
> write it out in its numerical form.
> ...
> If needed, you can use the chart shown in the first section of this
> unit to help you write out decimals.
> ...
> Now let's try practicing reading and writing decimals.

(ii)
> If there is no decimal, then it is a whole number.
> ...
> If there is an and, then there is a whole number to the left of the
> decimal, so write this number out and add a decimal on the end.

The last two lines are actually ambiguous between (ii) and (iii). I
suspect the first one is a (ii) and the second a (iii).

(ii) is just B. 2.a., but (i) also appears to be missing in OED.

> a. A decimal fraction (see A. 1b); in pl. often = the arithmetic of
> decimal fractions, 'decimal arithmetic' (see A. 1): cf. conics at
> conic n. 1.


But note that two citations under B. 2.a. actually refer to this meaning:

> 1660    T. Willsford Scales of Comm. 87   According to the rules of
> Multiplication in Decimals.
> 1706    W. Jones Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos 107   When a
> Decimal..is to be multiplied by an Unit with Cyphers.

The rest are all listed correctly. In fact, the 1660 citation mataches
the second part of the lemma--decimal arithmetic, although only barely.
The 1706 one is a bit ambiguous (could just mean the fractional part),
but there is no such ambiguity in current usage.

     VS-)

PS: I would also like to give a plug for OpenOffice--a free
multi-platform open-source "office" cluster alternative to MS Office
with nearly matching features (some shortcuts, such as TOC creation, may
be missing--I am yet to explore that). I've been using OOo and it's
predecessor, StarOffice for years. StarOffice was a Sun creation, sunk
into the bowels of Oracle. Nominally a commercial product, it was
distributed for free as a part of GooglePack. Oracle went one better,
simply placing OpenOffice as a free open-source application (hence the
OOo moniker) with no strings attached (other than the standard
open-source license). Most features of MS Office, if they are not
already built-in, are supplied by users as extensions or macros.
StarOffice could not handle docX files, but no such problem for the
current version (OOo 3.3).

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org