bit / byte

13 March 2023

[Added reference to nibble on 15 March 2023.]

This website comes to you in bits and bytes. But what are bits and bytes and why are they called that?

A bit is a basic unit of information that represents one of two alternative states, typically written as a 1 or a 0. The term was coined by mathematician John Wilder Tukey c.1947 while he was working at Bell Labs and Princeton University in New Jersey. The term is a play on words. It is supposedly an abbreviated form of Binary digIT, but it is also so called because it is a small piece, or literally bit, of information. It may, in fact, be a backronym, that is an acronym created from an already existing word. Tukey and his colleagues may have started talking about bits of information, and later Tukey invented the acronym from the word.

The first known use of bit in print is in a 1948 article by Tukey’s colleague at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon. The article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, is a foundational text in the science of information theory, and its role in the history of the word bit is simply a footnote to the article’s scientific importance:

The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J.W. Tukey.

Byte appears around a decade later, and it too is a play on words, this time playing off of bit and bite/bite-size. A byte is a grouping of bits, typically but not necessarily eight bits, that is operated upon as a single unit. The letters of the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals can each be represented by a single byte. (Writing systems with more than 256 characters, such as Chinese, require two or more bytes to represent each character.)

The earliest use of byte in print that I have found is in a June 1959 paper presented at a conference and published in the IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, although the wording here indicates the term was already in use:

For operations upon fields of variable length, it is generally necessary to specify the inner structure of the field. For alphabetic fields this consists of the individual letters or other characters. For numeric fields, the structure includes the sign, if any, and the digits, if separately encoded. These sub-units collectively have been named bytes. Since the coded representation of a byte naturally varies in size, byte sizes of one to eight bits may be specified and used.

In 1962, one of the authors of that paper, Werner Buchholz, edited a book on computer systems that expanded a bit on byte’s origin:

Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i.e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite, but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit.)

Nowadays, bytes are usually expressed in larger units designated with a prefix taken from Greek, such as kilobyte or terabyte:

• kilo- from χίλιοι (thousand); 1,024 bytes

• mega- from μεγα (great); 1,024 kilobytes

• giga- from γίγας (giant); 1,024 megabytes

• tera- from τέρας (monster); 1,024 terabytes

• peta- from penta- πέντε- (five) and tera-; 1,024 terabytes

• exa- from hexa- ἕξ (six); 1,024 petabytes

There is also the semi-humorous nibble or nybble referring to half a byte. That usage dates to at least 1967.

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Sources:

Brooks, Jr., F.P., G.A. Blaauw, and W. Buchholz. “Processing Data in Bits and Pieces.” IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, EC-8.2, June 1959, 121. IEEEXplore.org.

Buchholz, Werner, ed. Planning a Computer System: Project Stretch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962, 40. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bit, n.4, byte, n.; draft additions, 1993, s,v. bite, n.; third edition, September 2003, s.v. nibble, n.

Shannon, C.E. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal, 27.3, July 1948, 380. IEEEXplore.org.

Image credit: Frank Carmody, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

bismuth

Bismuth in the form of a synthetic crystal; oxidation has given it a colorful patina

10 March 2023

Bismuth is a brittle, silvery-white metal which takes on a rosy tint through oxidation when exposed to air. It is atomic number 83 and uses the symbol Bi. Long thought to be the element with the highest atomic number that is not radioactive, it has been found that that its natural isotope, Bi-209, emits alpha particles, but its half-life exceeds the current age of the universe.

Bismuth is common in nature but for most of history was confused with lead or tin, a confusion that persisted into the eighteenth century. It was also believed by some to be an immature form of silver, called tectum argenti (hidden silver), that if left in the ground would become true silver.

The name comes from the Old High German Wismut or Wismuth, a term of uncertain origin, although the first element is very likely related to weiße (white). In the sixteenth century, minerologist Georgius Agricola Latinized the German name into bisemutium, from which the modern German and English names are derived. The English name bismuth is in place by the mid seventeenth century when it appears in a translation of German-Dutch alchemist Johann Rudolf Glaubner’s 1651 A Description of New Philosophical Furnaces:

It is not unknown to the diggers of minerals that sometimes there are immature minerals found which have neither gold nor silver in them, which being a little while exposed to the aire, and then being tryed yeeld gold and silver as wel in a greater as in a lesser proofe; such are Bismuth, Coboltum, Auripigmentum; and other Antimonial, and Arsenical minerals.

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Sources:

Glauber, Johann Rudolf. A Description of New Philosophical Furnaces. J.F.D.M., trans. London: Richard Coats for Thomas Williams, 1651, 365. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bismuth, n.

Weeks, Mary Elvira. “The Discovery of the Elements. II. Elements Known to the Alchemists.” Journal of Chemical Education, 9.1, January 1932, 15–16.

Big Apple

The Home Run Apple at the NY Mets’ Citi Field, Queens, New York

8 March 2023

New York City is known as the Big Apple. The nickname dates to the early twentieth century and arises out of a confluence of several discourses: Black slang, horse racing, the theater, and an older use of the phrase to refer to the stakes of a wager.

The use of big apple to refer to betting stakes is American, and perhaps specifically New England, slang dating to at least 1839. The following appears in Boston’s Saturday Morning Transcript of 16 March of that year:

The New York Courier says that Mr. CALHOUN will be the Special Ambassador to England, to settle the Boundary question. We will wager a big apple that Mr. Calhoun will not, and that Mr. WEBSTER will be the man. The President, and at least two members of the Cabinet, are strongly inclined to give the appointment to the Massachusetts Senator.

Other examples can be easily found. For instance, there is this from Boston’s Bay State Democrat of 30 December 1840:

Reader, we will bet you a big apple that you can’t read our correspondent’s letter from Salt River, without having your risible faculties affected “prodigiously!”

Or this from Massachusetts’s Salem Register of 23 December 1841

A little fellow came running into our office, a few mornings since, in hot haste for a newspaper. The paper hadn’t been left, and the reason he called for it was, “because Father couldn’t go to his work, and Mother couldn’t eat her breakfast till the paper came.” That boy will be a grand subscriber for somebody, we’ll wager a big apple. It is needless to add that his father always pays for this paper punctually.

And a big apple became associated with gambling on horseracing by 18 June 1842 when this appeared in New York’s The New World:

If it be discreditable to like a horse-race, there is one stain at least on my escutcheon[.] From the time I first learned to appreciate ambition and speed—two attributes, so common to our people—I have always yearned toward horses fleet of foot, and if I ever travel to bankruptcy (which Heaven avert) it will be on a fast horse. Yet gambling is detestable to me in every form—I never stake even “a big apple” on a contingency, and would prefer pauperism to wealth gained by luck.

The association of big apple with New York City can be traced to the following extended metaphor that appears in 1909’s The Wayfarer in New York. Here a big apple is something important, something that garners the most attention:

New York is merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other, but the tree has no great degree of affection for its fruit. It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap. It is disturbed by the enormous drawing power of a metropolis which constantly attracts to itself wealth and its possessors from all the lesser centers of the land. Every city, every State pays an annual tribute of men and of business to New York, and no State or city likes particularly to do it.

This sense gains a purchase in theater slang, and we see the following in the Chicago Defender of 28 October 1911. This appearance is doubly significant in that the Chicago Defender was a major Black newspaper, and the appearance marks its use in Black slang as well:

George Hayes and the Clancy Twins are the “big apple on the tree” this week. The twins can sing and their slang is the cutest stunt imaginable.

We next see big apple appear in several Defender columns by Billy Tucker in 1920. Tucker was a performer who wrote a column for the paper from Los Angeles titled Coast Dope. His column for 15 May 1920 makes a reference to L.A. as the Big Apple, using the term in reference to a big city but showing that it was not yet specifically associated with New York:

Dear Pal, Tony: No, Ragtime Billy Tucker hasn’t dropped completely out of existence, but is still in the “Big Apple.” Los Angeles. I want to tell the world and a half of Kankakee that a few weeks ago, when I told the Old Roll Top Desk Man that I could place entertainers and musicians in sunny California, I received a “zillion” letters from all over the United States, including Georgia.

Later that year, 16 September 1920, Tucker makes his first recorded reference to New York as the Big Apple:

Dear Pal, Tony: When your letter came last week I had already sent the “Coast Dope” in. I am awfully sorry that it didn’t come a day sooner. I trust your trip to “the big apple” (New York) was a huge success and only wish I had been able to make it with you, but they keep me too busy out here.

But what cemented the relationship between New York and the Big Apple is the writing of John J. Fitz Gerald, who wrote a racing column for that city’s Morning Telegraph. Fitz Gerald was especially fond of the term. He first uses it in his column for 3 May 1921:

J.P. Smith, with Tippity Witchet and others of the L.T. Bauer string, is scheduled to start for “the big apple” to-morrow after a most prosperous Spring campaign at Bowie and Havre de Grace.

And there is this from 1 April 1922:

B. Parke, the stable rider, is reputed a good 2-year-old rider, and the stable connections claim he is a gun away from the barrier. He will have the acid test put to him on “The Big Apple” within a few weeks.

On 18 February 1924, Fitz Gerald wrote on how the term came to his attention. It was used in a conversation he overheard between two New Orleans stable hands that probably occurred on 15 January 1920. Fitz Gerald’s reconstruction of the conversation is as follows:

The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.

———

Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbreds around the “cooling rings” of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans and engaging in desultory conversation.

“Where y’all goin’ from here?” queried one.

“From here we’re headin’ for The Big Apple,” proudly replied the other.

“Well, you’d better fatten up them skinners or all you’ll get from the apple will be the core,” was the quick rejoinder.

And we see the following in the Tampa Sunday Tribune of 4 January 1925. This citation shows that the term had not only reached Florida by this date, but it had returned to theater circles—if it had ever left:

Angels are popularly supposed to have wings. Those of Broadway usually use theirs to fly away from the “Big Apple”—as it is sometimes called—but only after their wings have been prettily singed by some fascinating cutie whom they backed financially to the tune of many thousands.

After a while, the use of Big Apple declined until it was revived as a tourism slogan in the 1970s.

The Big Apple is a great example of how a phrase can circulate in multiple discourses, acquiring different meanings and connotations, before going “mainstream” and narrowing to a single, primary sense.

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Sources:

Credit for this one goes, first and foremost, to Barry Popik, who has relentlessly researched this phrase over the years.

Adams, Minnie. “Musical And Dramatic.” Chicago Defender, 28 October 1911, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bay State Democrat (Boston, Massachusetts), 30 December 1840, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Fitz Gerald, John J. “Nevada Farm Has Fine Juveniles.” Morning Telegraph (New York), 1 April 1922, 8. Fultonhistory.com. (The Morning Telegraph is not, to my knowledge, digitized. The Fulton History site, however, has some select pages available, and transcripts of the many, if not most, of the early Big Apple uses in that paper can be seen at Barry Popik’s site.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. Big Apple, n.

“Newspaper Readers of the Right Stamp.” Salem Register (Massachusetts), 23 December 1841, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. Big Apple, n.

Page, Will A. “Behind the Curtain of Broadway’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Trust.” Tampa Sunday Tribune (Florida), 4 January 1925, Magazine Section 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Popik, Barry. “Why is New York City Called the Big Apple?” Barrypopik.com, 5 July 2004.

Ramble, Lincoln. “The Course and the Race.” The New World (New York), 18 June 1842, 395. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Saturday Evening.” Saturday Morning Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), 16 March 1839, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tucker, Billy. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 15 May 1920, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Coast Dope.” Chicago Defender, 16 September 1920, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

The Wayfarer in New York. New York: Macmillan, 1909, xv. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Richiekim, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Oscar

The Oscar statuette awarded to Jiří Menzel’s 1966 film Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky). The Czech film won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 40th Academy Awards in 1968.

8 March 2023

The annual awards of the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science are popularly dubbed the Oscars. How the name became associated with the awards is unknown, but there are many competing claims for its coinage. The awards were first presented in 1929, and Oscar became associated with them in the early 1930s.

Brazilian film scholar Waldemar Dalenogare Neto uncovered the earliest known use of Oscar in reference to the awards in a newspaper column by Relman Morin that appeared in the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record of 5 December 1933:

What's happened to the annual Academy banquet? 

As a rule, the banquet and the awarding of "Oscar," the bronze statuette given for best performances, is all over long before this.

But so far, not even a mention of the affair.

Ten days later, a second use of the name appeared in the Seattle Star:

Cause of Worry

Away from here it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but Hollywood is very much interested in what has become of the annual dinner and “award” of the Academy. Its full title is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and each year it has been holding a dinner and presenting bronze [sic] statuette to the actor or actress voted as having turned in the best role for the season. Last year it went to Helen Hayes.

It should have been over long before this, but to date “Oscar,” which is the players’ pet name for the statue, is without an owner. It is whispered that the vote gave it to one of the 40-odd actors who withdrew from the academy last spring to join an actor group affiliated with the A.F.L.

Prior to the discovery of these 1933 uses, the earliest known use of Oscar as a name for the Academy Award was in a New York Daily News column by Sidney Skolsky bearing a dateline of 16 March 1934. The column uses Oscar several times:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made its annual awards for the outstanding achievements in the motion picture field at their banquet in the Ambassador Hotel this evening.

These awards mean to Hollywood what the Pulitzer prize means to dramatists and novelists. It is the picture people’s main incentive to strive for “artistic achievement” in an industry where their worth is judged by box office figures.

At tonight’s banquet the winners, while movieland looked on and applauded, were presented with bronze statues. To the profession these statues are called Oscars.

[…]

The Oscar for the best production of the year went to Fox for “Cavalcade.” This picture, which rated four stars in The News, was awarded the prize in competition with such four-star specials as “Little Women,” Smilin’ Thru” and “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”

[…]

Laughton, who started as a kitchen clerk in the Claridge Hotel in London, also was not present to receive his little Oscar. This actor at present is touring the provinces of England in Shakespearean plays at a $100-per-week salary. He always wanted to prove he could act.

The Oscar for the best direction went to Frank Lloyd for “Cavalcade.”

Saral [sic] Y. Mason and Victor Heerman will take turns on the Oscar for their adaptation on “Little Women.” And the award for the best original story of the year went to Robert Lord for “One Way Passage.”

Skolsky would mention Oscar again in his column the next day:

The Academy Awards met with the approval of Hollywood, there being practically no dissension…The Academy went out of its way to make the results honest and announced that balloting would continue until 8:00 o’clock of the banquet evening…Then many players arrived late and demanded the right to vote…So voting continued until 10:00 o’clock or for two hours after the ballot boxes were supposed to be closed…It was King Vidor who said: “This year the election is on the level”…Which caused every one [sic] to comment about the other years…Although Katherine Hepburn wasn’t present to receive her Oscar, her constant companion and the gal she resides with in Hollywood, Laura Harding, was there to hear Hepburn get a round of applause for a change…The number of votes actually cast for these highly-touted prizes are kept a secret, but if you must know there were only about eight hundred votes cast.

Despite the fact that his original column referred to Oscar as an already existing industry term, Skolsky would later claim that he coined the name for this column in an attempt to deflate some of the hype and puffery surrounding the awards. He said the inspiration came from an old vaudeville bit where a comedian onstage would kid the orchestra leader with the question, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?” But given the earlier citations of its use, he clearly was not the originator of the name. (Trivia: the original Oscar in the vaudeville bit was Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of the playwright/lyricist, who in addition to being a composer and theater impresario, also owned a cigar factory.)

In a 1972 book, screenwriter Frances Marion recalled that Walt Disney referred to the award he won at the same 1934 ceremony that Skolsky attended as Oscar. He may have, but Disney won many Oscars, and nearly forty years after the fact Marion could very well have misremembered the date.

As to the term’s coinage, the Academy itself is non-committal, but seems to favor one of its own as the coiner. Academy press statements often credit the coinage to Margaret Herrick, née Gledhill, who started working as the Academy’s librarian in 1931 and would rise to become its executive secretary. Supposedly, on her first day of work she saw one of the statuettes and declared that it looked like her Uncle Oscar. While the tale is plausible, there is no evidence to support Herrick’s coinage.

Bette Davis is often credited with the coinage because at the 1936 ceremony she referred to her award as Oscar. According to Davis, the statue’s backside reminded her of her then husband Harmon Oscar Nelson. But clearly the name was already in well established by this date.

Others credit John LeRoy Johnston, a Hollywood photographer and public relations director with the coinage. Again, there is no direct evidence for this claim. In his blog post on the possible origins of Oscar, Peter Jensen Brown suggests that the inspiration may have been Oscar Smith, a Black actor and Hollywood boot black who was well-known to the Hollywood elites. While it’s nice to think that he would be so honored in an era when Black contributions to Hollywood were often overlooked, there’s no reason to think that is actually the case. Lots of people associated with films of the era were named Oscar, and there needs to be evidence to connect any individual Oscar with the award before such a claim can be considered.

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that the name Oscar comes not from the artistic side of Hollywood, but rather from the technical one. Among acoustical engineers of the era, oscar was jargon for oscillation. The term appears in glossaries as early as 1929 and specifically in one in the 1931 Motion Picture Almanac. Furthermore, the Academy’s first Scientific and Technical Awards were presented in 1931 and several of the early awards went to advancements in sound engineering. And in making the transition from oscillation to statuette, in the early 1930s, Bell Labs developed a wax manikin for calibration and equalization of binaural audio signals—just as humans have two ears, one on each side of the head, the manikin had microphones in place of ears. The engineers at Bell Labs named the manikin Oscar. A description appears in the April 1932 issue of Popular Science:

A wax dummy serves as critic during the orchestra rehearsals of Leopold Stokowski, famous conductor. Named “Oscar,” it sits through a performance at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with an impassive expression on its molded face. But its ears never miss a note, for they are twin microphones connected to an amplifying system and earphones. By listening in, engineers can determine the best arrangement of the orchestra for radio broadcasting purposes.

It is highly probable that Hollywood sound engineers were aware of the manikin and the work at Bell Labs, and perhaps it was some anonymous sound engineer who dubbed the statuette Oscar. And we have another award name that followed a similar path. The name Emmy, the name of the award given for similar awards in television, comes from industry slang Immy, short for image orthicon, a type of vacuum tube used in early television production. While the evidence for this hypothesis is circumstantial, it is more substantial than the evidence for any of the other explanations.

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Sources:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. “History of the Scientific and Technical Awards.” Oscars.org.

Brown, Peter Jensen. “Envelope Please—Unwrapping Oscar’s Origin Stories.” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 22 February 2019.

Dalenogare Neto, Waldemar. “Descoberta: primeira menção ao nome Oscar na imprensa.” Criticas de Filmes (blog), June 2021. (In Portugeuse).

Holden, Anthony. Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards. Toronto: Viking, 1993, 84. Archive.org.

“Hollywood from the Inside.” Seattle Star, 15 December 1933, 16/2. Newspapers.com.

Lawson, James Eric. “Re: [ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 26 February 2023.

Morin, Relman. “Cinematters.” Evening Post-Record (Los Angeles), 5 December 1933, 4/2. Newspapers.com. [The database’s metadata has this appearing on page 2.]

The Motion Picture Almanac. New York: Quigley, 1931, 94. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2004, s.v. Oscar, n.3.

Paul, Stephan. “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Develpments." Acta Acustica, 95, September 2009, 767–88 at 769–70. ResearchGate.

Popik, Barry. “Oscar (Academy Award).” Barrypopik.com, 23 December 2007.

Popular Science, April 1932, 48. Google Books.

Sands, Pierre Norman. A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927–1947). PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 1966. New York: Arno Press, 1973, 91n. Archive.org.

Scheuer, Philip K. “Talkies Give New Tongue.” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1929, 26/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Shapiro, Fred. “[ADS-L] Antedating of ‘Oscar’ (Discovered by Brazilian Film Scholar).” ADS-L, 25 February 2023.

Skolsky, Sidney. “Films Crown Hepburn, Laughton Year’s Best.” Daily News (New York), 17 March 1934, Brooklyn Final Edition, 3/2, 23/2. Newspapers.com. [Note: Not all editions of the paper carry the column.]

———. “Hollywood” (18 March 1934). Daily News (New York), 19 March 1934, 32/3. Newspapers.com

Photo credit: Martin Vorel, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

galaxy / Milky Way

6 March 2023

The arch of the Milky Way above the Atacama Desert, Chile. The bright dot near the top of the arch is Jupiter, elongated due to the panoramic projection. The two Magellanic Clouds can be seen to the left. The curved line to the right of the image is the trail of an airplane.

Galaxy is a word that dates to antiquity but one whose primary meaning has shifted over the centuries as our scientific understanding of the universe has grown. Galaxy is from the post-classical, i.e., the fifth century, Latin galaxias, which in turn came from the Hellenistic Greek γαλαξίας (milky circle). Galaxias appears in Anglo-Latin by the twelfth century, and parallel borrowings of the word are found in many present-day European languages.

The Greek γαλαξίας (galaxias), meaning milky circle, is a giveaway to the original meaning. For most of the word’s life, galaxy referred to what we in English call the Milky Way, the band of light that stretches across the night sky (at least where light pollution is minimal). The names come from Greco-Roman myth, a story that is recorded in Pseudo-Erastothenes’s Katasterismoi (Constellations), a text from the first century C.E. but which draws upon earlier sources:

The Galaxy is one of the heavenly circles. It was not possible for the sons of Zeus to share in heavenly honor before one of them had been nursed by Hera. And so, they say that Hermes brought Herakles just after his birth and placed him at Hera’s breast, and that he was nursed by her. When Hera discovered the trick, she pushed Herakles away and the remaining milk was spilled, forming the Galaxy.

(The text was long attributed to the third-century B.C.E. mathematician Erastothenes of Cyrene, but he is no longer thought to be the author, hence the credit to the anonymous Pseudo-Erastothenes.)

Galaxy appears in English by the close of the fourteenth century. John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæs Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) uses it, although Trevisa uses the Latin inflections:

De galaxia siue lacceo circulo. Capitulum viii.

Galaxias is a cercle of heuen more faire and briȝt þanne oþir cercles, and passiþ by þe myddel of heuen; and bygynneþ from þe est, and passiþ to þe norþ by þe signes þat hatte Cancer and Capricornus and eft to his owne poynt. And þis cercle hatte “þe milky cercle”, for amonge alle þe cerclis of heuen þat cercle is most briȝt and clere and most notable.

(About the galaxy or milky circle. Chapter 8.

The galaxy is a circle of heaven more fair and bright than other the other circles, and it passes through the middle of heaven; it begins in the east and passes to the north by the signs that are called Cancer and Capricorn and then back to its own point. And this circle is called “the milky circle,” for among all the circles of heaven this circle is the most bright and clear and most notable.)

But at about the same time, Chaucer uses the word in his poem The House of Fame, and there is no doubt that the word had been assimilated into English here:

“Now,” quod he thoo, “cast up thyn yë.
Se yonder, loo, the Galaxie,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey
For hit is whit (and somme, parfey,
Kallen hyt Watlynge Strete).”

(“Now,” he then said, “cast up your eye.
See yonder, lo, the galaxy,
Which men call the Milky Way
For it is white (and some, by my faith,
Call it Watling Street).”)

(Watling Street was a Roman road that ran from Dover to Chester and was a major thoroughfare in medieval England.)

This passage is also one of the earliest known to use the phrase Milky Way. Of course, those in antiquity and the Middle Ages, had no notion that the galaxy was just one of thousands and that the Milky Way was just what an island of stars looked like from our position inside of one. The extension of the word galaxy to encompass other nebulae in the night sky would come by the end of the seventeenth century. From John Fryer’s 1698 A New Account of East-India and Persia:

Steering now by the Crosiers, a South Constellation, taking its Name from the Similitude of that Pastoral Staff; as also supplied by the Magellanian Clouds, in number Two, (averred to be such by those that use this way continually) fixed as the North Star; but to me they seem no other than a Galaxia, caused by the Reflection of the Stars.

We now know, of course, that the Magellanic Clouds are two dwarf, elliptical galaxies that are part of our local group of galaxies, which also includes the spiral galaxies of Andromeda and Triangulum. It wouldn’t be until the twentieth century that astronomers recognized galaxies, including our own Milky Way, for what they are, and galaxy acquired the astronomical meaning that we use today.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The House of Fame.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 359, lines 935–39.

Condos, Theony. The Katasterismoi of the Pseudo_Eratosthenes. PhD Dissertation. University of Southern California, August 1970, 224–27. ProQuest Dissertations.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. galaxias, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Fryer, John. A New Account of East-India and Persia. London: R.R. for Ri. Chiswell, 1698, 11. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. galaxie, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. galaxy, n.; March 2002, s.v. Milky Way, n.

Pseudo-Eratosthenes. Katasterismoi (Constellations), part 2 of 2. Theony Condos, trans. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Leaflet 467, November 1970, chap. 44, 8. SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæs Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 1 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 8.8, 459. London, British Library, MS Additional 27944.

Photo credit: Bruno Gilli, European Southern Observatory (ESO), 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.