Weird Words of Science 7: nano dreams
Orac is dreaming of an iPod nano.
Where does nano come from? The root comes from the Greek for dwarf.
The prefix was formally adopted in the late 1940s to mean 10^-9, as in
a nanometer. The construction had been floating around since the early
part of the 20th century. The OED catalogs the first appearance in
English in nanphanerophyte (a small shrub), but the French were using
it about 50 years earlier.
Nano along now carries the connotation of the very small, typically on
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