The Morse Code History of Umpteen

Hello,

Part of the reason for this blog’s existence is funny sounding words. Fooling with them is how I got started with etymology. Umpteen definitely falls into that category but I would include it anyhow because of its Morse code history.

I lost my morse code dots, these will have to do instead

I covered Morse code, and its inventor, in “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”, my book about eponyms. Morse code is a telegraphic system of communication where dots and dashes are combined to represent letters and numbers. The information is sent as a series of electrical signals. Short signals, represented by dots, are called dits while long signals, represented by dashes, are called dahs.

After launching, the combination of dits and dahs gained the nickname of iddy-umpty because of how it sounded. The dash was the umpty part and by 1905 had gained a meaning of an unknowable or large number. The idea was that we had twenty, thirty, forty then the unknown number would be umpty, rhyming with the others.

It didn’t take long for the umpty idea to creep into military slang where a term for a large number could be useful. By 1907 the ty ending had changed to be a teen ending (just like thirteen, fourteen, etc.). That gave us umpteen (many, a lot of) and it gained widespread use thanks the World War I army slang usage. We have been using umpteen ever since.

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Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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