3 ms·
The story I heard is that it's an abbreviation for the Latin word "recipe" ("take"). Apparently it was a convention in handwritten manuscripts to use a dash to
by vilhelm_s 9y ago
The story I heard is that it's an abbreviation for the Latin word "recipe" ("take"). Apparently it was a convention in handwritten manuscripts to use a dash to indicate abbreviations where letters have been omitted, hence a dashed R in this case.
- pacaro 9y agoInteresting. I have no definitive source, my understanding came from a conversation with a typographer 10+ years ago. A little digging around suggests that receipt was in use in English (meaning list of ingredients) both in the culinary and pharmaceutical sense from the 14th century, and recipe was introduced a couple of hundred years later. Both, of course, from the same Latin root.
- Papirola 9y agoin Spanish they are still the same word: "receta"
- amyjess 9y agoWhat you're talking about is called a scribal abbreviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation It's actually more complex than simply adding a slash to indicate you're omitting letters. Both the position of the mark and the kind of mark you make indicate exactly what letters are being omitted. It's a medieval form of shorthand, except unlike modern shorthand, it appears in all kinds of books. Back when every copy of every book had to be written by hand, it was acceptable to take shortcuts. Oh, and the really cool part is that scribal abbreviations were the banner feature of Unicode 5.1 (you can thank MUFI for putting the work into getting these into Unicode), so you can actually use them in text now!