digit: [15] Digit was borrowed from Latin digitus. This meant ‘finger or toe’, but its underlying etymological sense is probably ‘pointer’; it appears to come from an Indo-European base *deik-, which also produced Latin dicere ‘say’ (originally ‘point out’), Greek deiknúnai ‘show’, Sanskrit di?- ‘show’, and possibly English toe.
The word was used in classical times for a measure of length, a ‘finger’s breadth’, but the mathematical sense ‘any of the numbers from 0 to 9’ (originally as counted on the fingers) is a later development. Digitalis [17], the scientific name of the ‘foxglove’, is a modern Latin use of the Latin adjective digitālis ‘of the finger’, perhaps in allusion to the foxglove’s German name fingerhut ‘thimble’, literally ‘finger-hat’. => toe
digit (n.)
late 14c., "numeral below 10," from Latin digitus "finger or toe" (also with secondary meanings dealing in counting and numerals), related to dicere "tell, say, point out" (see diction). Numerical sense is because numerals under 10 were counted on fingers. The "finger or toe" sense in English is attested from 1640s.
例文
1. Australia had 15 years of double- digit infration.
オーストラリアの15年間のインフレ率は2桁を維持している。
2.Her telephone number differs from mine by one digit .
彼女の電話番号と私の数字は1つしか違わない。
3.The computer can multiply two 10- digit numbers in 1/1000 second.
コンピュータは、10桁の数字2つの積を1000分の1秒以内に算出することができる。
4.I cannot see more than that，except beyond plankton is the digit zero.
これ以上遠くに行くと私は何も見えなくなる.プランクトンの外はゼロという数字しか見えない。
-廊橋遺夢
5.He mentally computed the square root of a hundred- digit number in fifty-two minutes.