So I came across the words “minuend” and “subtrahend” today. Apparently these words are part of elementary school math vocabulary. I’d never heard of them before today.
Are these words I should have learned when I learned how to subtract, or is this some weird new education fad?
Is this something to do with common core?
That’s what I’m gathering. I’m studying to be an elementary school teacher and they were in the textbook as examples of “specialized math terms” that students might struggle with, along with a bunch of terms I recognized like denominator, subtraction, and divisor.
So I was reading and going “okay, yeah, I remember that- subtra-what?”
Are they French words? Cause they kinda look like it? Isn’t it bad enough when they throw in letters and “imaginary” numbers now they gotta throw in A TOTALLY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE IN THE MIX?!
I guess they’ve been around for a while, just nobody uses them except when teaching subtraction, and then never again after that.
I don’t ever remember hearing those ever before in my life
Maths has its own jargon and language
Addition and multiplication don’t take into account the order of factors, but subtraction and division do, which is why they gave both quantities a defined role, each with a name.
