Insurance and the claim

The twelfth entry is o atuário, and the word carries a Roman office job inside it. Latin actuarius named a clerk: the man who took down what was said and wrote up the acta, the record of a session, and the same title went to the quartermaster who kept the supply book. Nothing in it points at mathematics. English borrowed the word with that meaning still attached, and for a long time « an actuary » was simply the registrar of a company, the officer who kept its books and its minutes. The modern sense arrived late, and by an accident of employment: when the first life offices needed somebody to put a price on a policy, the person already sitting with the books was the actuary, so the name followed the arithmetic rather than the other way round. Portuguese took the finished sense back and left the clerk behind, which is why o atuário is never a keeper of records, and why O atuário calcula quanto custa cada garantia describes a calculation the Roman word never mentioned.