score

The word 'score' elegantly connects the worlds of sport, arithmetic, and carpentry through a single image: a notch cut into a piece of wood.‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍ It entered English from Old Norse 'skor,' meaning a notch, incision, or tally mark, and by extension, the number twenty. The Old Norse word derives from Proto-Germanic '*skurō' (a cut, notch), which traces ultimately to Proto-Indo-European '*(s)ker-' (to cut) — the same root that gave English 'shear,' 'short,' and, through Latin and Greek, 'curtail' and 'score' in its musical sense.

The connection between 'notch' and 'twenty' is not arbitrary. In medieval northern Europe, tally sticks were the primary accounting technology for illiterate populations. Shepherds counting sheep, merchants tallying goods, and tax collectors recording payments would cut notches into sticks of wood or bone. A common convention was to make a larger or different notch at every twentieth mark — a visual grouping that made the tally easier to read. This larger notch was the 'score,' and through metonymy the word came to mean the number twenty itself.

The counting sense persisted in English for centuries and remains familiar thanks to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 1863: 'Four score and seven years ago' — meaning eighty-seven years. This biblical-sounding phrasing was already archaic in Lincoln's day; he chose it for rhetorical gravity. The King James Bible also uses 'score' as a counting word ('the days of our years are threescore years and ten'), which helped preserve it in formal English long after everyday speech had abandoned it.

The sporting sense — the number of points achieved in a game — developed naturally from the tally-keeping meaning. When two teams or individuals competed, their points were literally 'scored': cut into a tally stick or scratched onto a slate. To 'score a goal' or 'score a run' preserves this physical image of recording a mark. The noun shifted from meaning the act of marking to meaning the cumulative total of marks, and eventually to the abstract concept of points in any competitive context.

The musical sense of 'score' — a written composition showing all instrumental parts — emerged in the late sixteenth century and connects to the tally meaning through a different mechanism. Musical scores originally had lines drawn ('scored') across the page to align the parts visually, and the document itself came to be called a score.

The verb 'to score' expanded metaphorically throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 'To score a point' in an argument draws on the sporting sense. 'To score' meaning to obtain something — slang since the mid-twentieth century — extends the idea of achieving or winning. 'To settle a score' preserves the older sense of a debt recorded by notches.

Across the Scandinavian languages, the word's descendants remain close to the original meaning. Swedish 'skåra' means a notch or groove; Norwegian 'skår' means a nick or cut. Icelandic 'skor' retains the Old Norse form almost unchanged. The PIE root '*(s)ker-' is extraordinarily productive: beyond the words already mentioned, it yielded Latin 'cortex' (bark — something cut from a tree), Greek 'keirein' (to cut, shear), and English 'shirt' and 'skirt' (garments cut from cloth — themselves a doublet, one Norse and one native English, from the same root).

The word 'score' thus sits at a remarkable intersection of material culture and language. A technology as simple as cutting notches into a stick gave English a word that now appears on every sports broadcast, in every musical program, and in some of the most famous oratory in American history.