How ‘odd’ became normal

‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill were to be married. ‘Did you ever hear any thing so strange?’ Those two words, strange and odd, are being used almost universally about the quality of the past few weeks.

Odd is Scandinavian in origin, Viking if you like. The root idea is of triangularity, as when you have an odd bit of land left over. It’s found in place-names, such as Greenodd, which used to be in Lancashire until, in 1974, it was conquered and swallowed by Cumbria. Such three-cornered oddity is like that of the triangle of land called the Angle (in southern Schleswig, which I believe is German at the moment). This was seen by Angles of England as their old homeland. Its shape resembled a fish-hook, with which one angles. The Romans and Greeks used related words to mean a geometrical angle.

If the Icelanders of the Middle Ages had seen the film The Third Man, they would have called it Odda-Mathr. A third man was both the odd man out and the one who cast the deciding vote. An odd number was odda-tala.

Odd numbers by that name made their appearance in English only in the 14th century. Number was a borrowing from Romance languages. Before that, English used words like tel and rim (as a teller counts votes or a rhymester lisps in numbers). Odd and number came together in John Trevisa’s translation, in the 1390s, of Bartholomew the Englishman’s encyclopedia, compiled in the previous century, On the Properties of Things.

By the 16th century, students of arithmetic learnt about oddly odd numbers (two odd numbers multiplied).