a type of mathematics in which letters and symbols are used to represent quantities Topics Maths and measurementc1, Educationc1代数学 Word Originlate Middle English: from Italian, Spanish, and medieval Latin, from Arabic al-jabr ‘the reunion of broken parts’, ‘bone-setting’, from jabara ‘reunite, restore’. The original sense, ‘the surgical treatment of fractures’, probably came via Spanish; the mathematical sense comes from the title of a book, ‘ilm al-jabr wa'l-muqābala ‘the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like’, by the mathematician al-K̲wārizmī (see algorithm).