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The plus and minus signs (+ and ) are used universally to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations of addition and subtraction. Their use has been extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms.

History


Though the signs now seem as familiar as the alphabet or the Hindu-Arabic numerals, they are not of great antiquity. The Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for addition, for example, resembled a pair of legs walking in the direction in which the text was written (Egyptian was written in varying directions), with the reverse sign indicating subtraction:

D54- or -D55
In Europe in the early 15th century the letters P and M were generally used.

The earliest print appearance of the modern signs seems to come from a book on "Behende und hüpscheenung auff allen Kauffmanschafft" or Mercantile Arithmetic by Johannes Widmann in 1489, used to indicate surpluses and deficits. The + is a simplification of the Latin "et" (comparable to the ampersand &). The may be derived from a tilde written over m when used to indicate subtraction; or it may come from a shorthand version of the letter m itself.

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