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An abacus, also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool used primarily by Asians for performing arithmetic processes. Today, abaci are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal. The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written modern numeral system and is still widely used by merchants, traders and clerks in Asia, Japan, Africa, India and elsewhere. The user of an abacus is called an abacist; he or she slides the beads of the abacus by hand.[1] The use of the word abacus dates before 1387 AD, when a Middle English work borrowed the word from Latin to describe a sandboard abacus. The Latin word came from abakos, Hebrew abaq, "dust"[2]. The preferred plural of abacus is a subject of disagreement, but abacuses[3], abacata, and abaci[4] are in use. The period 2700–2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.[5]
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