econometrics

Note: The term econometrics is closely associated with the founding of the Econometric Society in December, 1929, by the Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch and others, and with the journal Econometrica, which began publication in 1933. The words econometric, econometrics, etc., are all dependent on French économétrie, which was introduced by Ragnar Frisch in the paper "Sur un problème d'économie pure," Norsk Matematisk Forenings skrifter, series I, no. 16 (1926), pp. 1-40. The French word was translated into English as econometry in a review of the paper published in 1927 (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 146-47). Curiously, the word econometry appeared earlier, apparently in a nonce usage, in A.R. Crathorne, "The Course in Statistics in the Mathematics Department," American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 33, no. 4, April, 1926, p. 186 ("Biologists and anthropologists have long recognized the principle implied here and have invented the words biometry and anthropometry. We might ask the economists to introduce the word econometry, but it would be very difficult to argue them out of their rather well grounded historical claim to some share in the word statistics."). Still earlier, the German word Oekonometrie was apparently coined—though in a much more restricted sense—by the Polish banker and economist Paweł Ciompa (Grundrisse einer Oekonometrie und die auf der Nationalökonomie aufgebaute natürliche Theorie der Buchhaltung, Lemberg [Lwów/L'viv], 1910), though Ragnar Frisch was not aware of Ciompa's word (see Frisch, "Note on the Term 'Econometrics'," Econometrica, vol. 4, issue 1 [January, 1936], p. 95). As a product of word formation, econometrics/econometry (and their French and German predecessors) can be regarded as either a blend (as indicated above) or as a truncation of economy, with the second -o- unetymologically taken as the combining vowel.