In recent years I've become very fond of asking my students why the White House is called the White House. When the question first comes up the students are usually dumbfounded. They wonder if I could really be asking them that question in a mathematics class—or any other class, for that matter—and they try to figure out what I might be driving at. More interestingly, though, they seldom know how to answer the question even though the answer is trivial. The White House is called the White House for two reasons: because it's white and because it's a house.

I started asking my trivial and seemingly irrelevant question because I noticed that most students are not good at using mathematical terminology. Many of them haven't realized that technical terms aren't just arbitrary syllables designed to make their lives more difficult. The point I try to make with my White House analogy is that most mathematical terms actually describe the things they refer to. The difficulty is that the descriptions are usually in Latin or Greek rather than English, and few students nowadays have been exposed to those ancient languages.

The study of the origins of words is known as etymology: this book is an etymological guide to the most common mathematical terms that occur in the elementary, secondary, and college curricula. Armed with this guide, students may find mathematics a little more understandable.