Pascal

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈpæskəl/

Definitions

1. A pressure unit defined as one newton per square meter coupled with a programming language developed in the 1970s aimed at promoting structured programming education
2. A measurement of pressure equivalent to one newton per square meter alongside a programming language established in the 1970s for instructing structured programming methods
3. A unit measuring pressure equal to the force of one newton acting on an area of one square meter ; a high-level programming language created in the early 1970s designed to teach good programming practices

Etymology: Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, has his name attached to a unit of pressure that he never knew existed. The pascal is defined as one newton per square metre, and it was adopted in the twentieth century to honour his work on fluids and the behaviour of air under pressure. Pascal's experiments showed that fluids transmit pressure evenly, a principle that now underlies hydraulic machinery, and his name was given to the unit in that spirit. The word reached English by way of French "pascal", taken directly from Pascal's surname, so it is a straightforward eponym rather than a word that evolved from an older form. It is a doublet of "paschal", a word that came into English from the same stem but through a religious route, where it refers to Easter. The two share a root in Latin "paschalis" and Greek "pascha", meaning Passover, yet they ended up as separate words, one scientific and one ecclesiastical.