Even new words tend to have clear etymologies. Laser was LASER, for example - an acronym became a word in itself. Many scientific terms are just from Latin or G

Even new words tend to have clear etymologies. Laser was LASER, for example - an acronym became a word in itself. Many scientific terms are just from Latin or Greek, which makes sense in the context of European science - languages that all scientists, regardless of where they were in Europe, would have at least some familiarity with, making it easier to translate and recognize across vernacular languages. I understand very little French, but “50 millimetre” doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out.