Etymologically
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integer

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Pronunciation

  • /ˈɪn.tɪ.d͡ʒə(ɹ)/[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin integer (“untouched, intact, whole, entire”),[2][3][4][5] formed from in- (“not”) and the root of tangō (“to touch”),[2][6][5][7] from Proto-Indo-European *tag- (“to touch, handle”).[3][8] Barnhart and Klein reconstruct an earlier Latin form *entagros.[5][9] The mathematical noun is a noun use of the Latin adjective.[3] It is a doublet of entire, which came through French,[5][2][10] and related to integral, integrate, integrity, intact and tangent.[10][9]

Earliest recorded meaning

As an adjective, having no part missing, whole: before 1509, in a letter of T. Wolsey to Henry VII.[2][6] The sense is obsolete.[2]

Semantic evolution

The noun was a mathematical term from its first record in 1571, in T. Digges's Pantometria: a whole number, as opposed to a fraction.[2][5][4][3] The adjective had a short life in English, meaning morally upright in 1644 and, in mathematics, whole, not fractional from 1660, a use now rare.[2][6] Johnson (1755) defined the noun simply as "the whole of any thing".[11] From 1822 it could mean a quantity taken as a unit of measurement; from the 1840s it was also a whole thing or entity in general, complete in itself or made up of parts.[2][4]

Timeline

  • before 1509 – adjective, whole, entire (obsolete).[2]
  • 1571 – noun, a whole number.[2][5][4]
  • 1644 – adjective, honest, upright (obsolete).[2]
  • 1660 – adjective, in mathematics, whole, not fractional.[2]
  • 1822 – a quantity taken as a unit of measurement.[2]
  • before 1848 – a whole thing or entity.[2]

Meanings

Noun

  1. A whole number: any of the natural numbers, their negatives, or zero, as opposed to a fraction: Seven and minus twelve are both integers.[12][4][2]
  2. A complete thing or entity; a whole.[12][4][2]

Word family

  • noninteger

References

  1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
  3. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
  4. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
  5. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
  6. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
  7. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  8. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  9. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
  10. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  11. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
  12. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins