Measures, amounts, change

The forty-first entry is la frazione, which does the arithmetic exactly as « fraction » does — una frazione di secondo, ridurre una frazione ai minimi termini — and then does a second job for which English has no one word. In Italian local government the comune is the smallest authority, and the outlying villages and hamlets that lie inside its boundary are its frazioni: a proper part of a whole, which is the arithmetic idea again, laid over a map. Road signs carry them, postal addresses carry them, and a house is placed in frazione Santa Maria, often shortened to fraz. A reader who owns only the mathematical sense will make nothing of that line, and « fraction » gives no help at all, because in English it never leaves the sense of a portion — « a fraction of the cost », « only a fraction of them came ». For the settlement, English has to pick a word by size and feel: « hamlet », « outlying village », or simply the name with « near » before it. One Italian noun, two readings, and only the sentence says which.