Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
>
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > Or, my personal (least) favorite, "hexadecimal" - chosen over the more
> > linguistically consistent (albeit still demonstrably artificial)
> > "sexadecimal" to avoid having "sex" in the word. *sigh*
>
> Humph - altho we have _sexaginta_ (60), _sexagesimus_ (60th) etc, the
> use of -a- as an infix between 'sex' and another morpheme is not
> productive in Latin. The Latin for 16 is 'sedecim'.
Well, I suppose that explains why one of my programming textbooks insisted on
writing 'sedecimal' instead of 'hexadecimal'.
Andreas