For what it's worth, both my oldish Macquarie Australian Dictionary and
my even older Shorter Oxford agree that Dr is an abbreviation for
debtor. Neither gives any etymology for the abbreviation and the Oxford
doesn't give any historical reference for it. The online free Oxford
dictionary https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dr gives it as a
abbreviation for debit without any further information.
Peter
On 6/09/2018 00:58, David Cousens wrote:
Derek
Latin past participles of creditum and debitum are debere and credere are a
possible explanation. Another theory is the
Dr stands for debit record and Cr credit record. Another is that Dr is from
debtors and Cr is from creditors. I favour
the first because Luca Pacciola who is often attributed (wrongly) with the
first known treatise in 1494 (Summa de
Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita) which had a section on
double entry accounting and formulated
the first documented use of the accounting equation used the terms debere (to
owe) and credere (to entrust) to describe
the two sides of the basic accounting equation but there is also evidence that
Pacciola used Per (from) and A (to) in
journal entries. I don't know if any originals of Pacciola's original treatise
have survived and most of the comments
are from an English translation in 1633 where Handson used Dr from the English
debtor. Another translator Geejsbeek in
1914 suggested Dr comes from "in dare" (give) and "in havere" (receive).
Pacciola apparently learned his accounting from
Arab traders in North Africa where his father was a merchant. Benedikt
Kotruljevic in 1458 also described double entry
accounting in a 1458 work on the Art of Trade published in Dubrovnik. I suspect
both were describing methodology used by
the Arab traders.There is also evidence that double entry might have been used
in 10th century Muslim tax office but
there is no definitive evidence. We will probably never know where the usage of
the notation actually came from and the
historians will continue to argue about it forever.
David Cousens
On Wed, 2018-09-05 at 09:59 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
Hi All,
I'm an Engineer by training; I've picked up a ton of accounting
knowledge just by being involved here for the past few decades, but
there's one thing I've seen recently that I honestly don't underdstand
and would appreciate if a CPA or Accounting Historian could answer.
Specifically, I've seen people show a transaction as:
Dr ... / Cr ...
So CR as an abbreviation for Credit makes sense to me (CRedit). But why
is Debit abbreviated as DR? There is no "R" in DEBIT. So where does
that come from? I would have expected it to be "Db".
Just curious.
-derek
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