[Wikipedia-l] RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Ångström

Wed Nov 20 23:14:44 UTC 2002

Actually, neither "angstrom" nor "nanometer" are in common use. Hardly anyone talks or writes about things small enough to require such terms, except scientists and some engineers.

The term "angstrom" will likely hang around at least for another generation, in the technical community.

But even a rare word, in an English-language encyclopedia, should be rendered according to the naming convention: when used as a unit of measure, the accents are dropped. When referring to the 19th-century Swedish physicist, the accents are retained. Fair enough?

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Vicki Rosenzweig [mailto:vr at redbird.org]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 4:53 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Ångström

At 01:31 PM 11/20/02 -0800, Bridget wrote:

Angstrom, being a word not in common usage at all, should be written Ångström, in honor of Anders Jonas Ångström, who was smarter than many of you and thus knew how to spell his own name. 

Angstrom is part of my everyday vocabulary, and that of many other people.
As a personal name, it takes a diacritic not available in English; as a term of
art in the metric system, it does not. Being so smart, you know this already.

-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org <http://www.redbird.org/> 

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