Monthly Archives: September 2009

Word of the day: sexagesimal

I didn’t know sexagesimal was a word until today.  Indeed, I think that most spell checkers will flag it as a misspelling.  Yet it is real.  And you can probably guess what it means: base-60 numeric.

It didn’t occur to me that anyone would formalize it as a number system, but apparently it did to the Babylonians and Sumerians.

Apparently it’s common in astronomy.