mantissa means A minor addition to a text. It carries an Arena rating of 1523, earned across 4 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, mantissa ranks #2,721 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #3,114 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #3,298 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #3,838 of 17,163 for Funniest Words.
mantissa is pronounced /mænˈtɪsə/.
Why “mantissa” is a great word
The fractional part of a common logarithm, or the significand in scientific notation that contains a number's significant digits. From Latin mantissa (also mantīsa), meaning 'a worthless addition or makeweight', of unknown origin, though suggested by ancient sources to be a loanword from Etruscan, possibly with Celtic mediation. Unlike 'exponent', which scales the entire value by orders of magnitude, or 'characteristic', which denotes the integer part before the decimal point, mantissa is the modest, precise residue that actually carries the information. It is the careful handwriting after the decimal in a field notebook, the significant figures preserved when a microscope finally brings the blur into focus, or the stubborn particularity that remains when all the grand architecture of magnitude has been stripped away: a reminder that meaning often resides not in the scale of things but in their exact, unrepeatable texture.
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin mantissa, mantīsa, of unknown origin (said by Festus to be a loanword from Etruscan, but it may actually be from Celtic, possibly through Etruscan mediation). Coincidentally, proparoxytone Greek μάντισσα (mántissa) means "female foreteller", as in χαρτομάντισσα (chartomántissa, “cartomancer”) or χειρομάντισσα (cheiromántissa, “chiromancer”).
noun
- A minor addition to a text.
- The part of a common logarithm after the decimal point, the fractional part of a logarithm.
- The significand; that part of a floating-point number or number in scientific notation that contains its significant digits.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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