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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). About this time, odd began to be applied to strange people, as when Nicholas Breton, in 1577, complained of living with some ‘odde lobcocke asse’.
Can it be a coincidence that today there is a syndrome called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)? It is recognised by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (currently DSM-5). Those suffering from it often lose their temper, are touchy and blame others for their mistakes. Odd, I thought, as I looked up and beheld my husband snoozing in his chair.
Also by Dot Wordsworth
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