Today's Word "Aliquot"
Published in Vocabulary
aliquot \AE-li-kweht\ (noun) - A number that divides another evenly, as 2, 3, 4, and 6 (but not 5) are aliquots of 12.
"Ali is an aliquot in any group, as she fits in smoothly with any crowd."
5,000 years ago the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) interrogative pronoun root was something like *kwo-, and we see it in the "quot" of today's word, from Latin aliquot "how many" from alius "other" + quot "how many." Since PIE [k] became [h] in English, we would expect our interrogative pronouns to begin with hw-, but instead we get "what," "when," "where," etc. However, pronounce them: they are, in fact, pronounced [hwaht], [hwen], [hwer]. Now, in Russian and other Slavic languages, the [kw] became simple [k]. Although they are radically different today, the Russian pronouns, kto "who," kogda "when," kuda "where," all come from the same source.
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