algebra

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
algebra /ˈaldʒɪbrə/

▶noun the part of mathematics in which letters and other general symbols are used to represent numbers and quantities in formulae and equations.

■ a system of this based on given axioms.

– derivatives
algebraic /aldʒɪˈbreɪɪk/ adjective,
algebraical adjective,
algebraically adverb,
algebraist noun.

word history: The word algebra comes from Arabic al-jabr ‘the mending of broken parts’, entering Middle English, via Italian, Spanish, and medieval Latin, in the sense ‘the setting of broken bones’. The modern mathematical sense comes from the title of a book, ‘ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala ‘the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like’, by the 9th-century Muslim mathematician Abū Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Mūsa. His nickname, al-Ḵwārizmī (literally ‘the man from Ḵwārizm’, now Khiva in Uzbekistan) is the root of the word algorithm.