Radix

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɹeɪ.dɪks/

Definitions

1. A number or value that serves as the base of a positional numeral system, or the root of a plant or nerve structure
2. The fundamental number used as the starting point in a place-value numeral system ; the part of a plant or nerve from which growth or development originates
3. A key numeral forming the foundation of how digits are weighted in a numbered system ; the anatomical beginning from which a living organism's structure extends

Etymology: Latin "rādīx" meant "root", and the same ancient stock also gave English "radish", making the two a doublet: one word that entered English twice, once as a native-looking vegetable name and once as a scholarly borrowing. The root idea is literal in both. A radish is, after all, mostly root, and the Latin word covered plants, teeth and anything else that grows downward from a base. English took "radix" directly from Latin as a learned borrowing, and it carried the root sense into mathematics and biology. In arithmetic, a radix is the base of a number system: the count of distinct digits from which every value is built, so that base ten uses ten digits and base two uses two. The notion is that the base is what everything else is rooted in, which explains why the term fits so neatly. In anatomy and botany, the same idea became the point of origin from which a structure grows.

Synonyms: root