Talk:center

I'm from New England. "Centre" is not at all common there. "Centre" is found in the U.S. about as often as "center" is found in England (rarely), so I'm rewriting this claim. -B


 * I ask, how can a tag of British or UK be applied to something, centre in this case, used by pretty well every English speaking nation apart from the US? --Amedeofelix 09:27, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
 * See the discussion on my page. --Amedeo 07:32, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Requests for verification - kept
Kept. See archived discussion of February 2008. 07:00, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

According to this website this word has PIE roots.

I am from India and I know that "center" is called "kendra" in Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali etc. We use it everyday. Even my childhood school is called "Kendriya Vidyalaya" (=Central School, i.e., a school funded by the central government of India).

But I am no expert. So I request someone to make the changes.

59.160.212.37 07:16, 4 April 2012 (UTC)


 * That is correct, center descends all the way from Proto-Indo-European. Our etymology is incomplete. —Stephen (Talk) 08:02, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
 * However, केंद्र kendra is certainly not a cognate. Its phonotactic structure is so glaringly incompatible with inherited Sanskrit vocabulary that I have to assume it's simply a loan from European languages, in view of the d likely from Modern Greek κέντρο, pronounced [ˈkʲe(n)dro] ~ [ˈce(n)dro]. (Or could it be a Koine Greek loan from the Hellenistic area when Greek and Indian cultures were in closer contact? I'm not sure how old the voicing after nasals is. In any case, it does not look like a loanword from English.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:37, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Separate entries?
Please see Talk:centre.  D b f  i  r  s   09:02, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Why are the definitions on the american spelling on the word centre. The correct spelling of centre is the English. Americanisms came after the olde English. Soooo, technically the definitions come from the English word not the American. unsigned comment by User:‎86.181.130.181 12:54, 1 December 2012 (UTC)


 * You sound like a very superior species! Everyone wants to be you! —Stephen (Talk) 18:33, 1 December 2012 (UTC)


 * There are good reasons for either spelling being considered the norm (number of speakers favors the US, for instance), so it's really pretty much arbitrary. As for UK forms being the original ones, that's often not true. There are plenty of cases where the US preserves older forms replaced in the UK by innovations there. Living languages are always changing- the version of English that gave rise to US English is no longer spoken by anyone on either side of the pond. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:42, 1 December 2012 (UTC)


 * That American English preserves certain words and spellings that have been supplanted in other dialects is a good argument here, since the word derives from French centre. 108.216.30.191 20:09, 11 June 2013 (UTC)


 * I assume that the comment is sarcasm, for the opposite is true. As centre is directly from the French, descending from Latin centrum and Greek kentron, it seems that centre should be considered the standard in a dictionary such as this. For that reason, I believe that the definitions should be moved to the centre entry. Zackstrickland (talk) 01:13, 23 October 2013 (UTC)


 * This is a hot issue that everyone disagrees on, so that won't happen any time soon. Equinox ◑ 17:21, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Possible derived terms, from Chambers 1908

 * central forces: forces whose action is to cause a moving body to tend towards a fixed point called the center of force.
 * center of attraction: the point to which bodies tend by the force of gravity.
 * center of inertia, center of mass: the center of a set of parallel forces acting on all the particles of a body, each force being proportional to the mass of the particle on which it acts.
 * center of oscillation: the point in a body occupied by that particle which is accelerated and retarded to an equal amount, and which therefore moves as if it were a single pendulum unconnected with the rest of the body.
 * center of percussion: the point in which the direction of a blow, given to a body, intersects the plane in which the fixed axis and the center of inertia lie, making the body begin to rotate about a fixed axis, without causing any pressure on the axis.
 * center of pressure: the point at which the direction of a single force, which is equivalent to the fluid pressure on the plane surface, meets the surface.

Equinox ◑ 00:02, 22 May 2019 (UTC)