Not a computer science invention. The word is a person’s name, run through nine centuries of translation.
“Algorithm” traces back to Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century scholar at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. His treatise on solving equations gave Europe both “algebra” (from al-jabr, “completion”) and, via the Latinized form of his own name — Algoritmi — the word “algorithm” itself. What started as a proper noun became, through centuries of copying and mistranslation, the generic term for any step-by-step procedure.
The concept it names is older than the word: a finite, unambiguous sequence of steps that transforms an input into an output, with no room for judgment calls along the way. That’s precisely the boundary this essay draws — an algorithm executes; it doesn’t decide what’s worth executing.
Source: Tatarchenko, K. “Algorithm’s Cradle,” Osiris, Vol. 38, University of Chicago Press, 2023.