ChatterBank3 mins ago
Why does a score mean twenty?
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I have Googled and cannot find the answer...
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scroll down about halfway and it gives you why it came about.
scroll down about halfway and it gives you why it came about.
A rather long anwer here - but I prefer the 10 fingers and toes remark earlier. "Score" rose from the Old Norse skor, meaning notch, and skera meaning to cut or shear -- an origin it shares with "shard" and "share" (from the notion of divvying something up). It entered the English language in the 14th century as a verb meaning to "notch with lines" and a noun meaning "twenty" -- a use familiar from the Bible's "threescore and ten" (that is 70) and Abraham Lincoln's "fourscore and seven years ago" (that is 87). What did 20 have to do with cutting? The best available guess is that 20 was a standard reference mark when putting notches in a stick (known as a tally) to keep track of debts owed.