How did the word algebra originate from the Arabic term al-jabr?
The term algebra is derived from the Arabic phrase al-jabr, which appears in the title of the 9th-century treatise Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa’l-muqābala, written by the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.123
In this context, al-jabr translates literally to "the reduction" or "restoring," referring to the mathematical process of moving a subtracted term from one side of an equation to the other to "restore" it as a positive value. The full title of the work is often translated as "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing," where al-jabr represents "completion" (or restoration) and al-muqābala represents "balancing".1423
When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the title was rendered as Algebra et Almucabal, and the term algebra eventually entered common usage to describe the branch of mathematics concerned with solving equations.23