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The Swedish name is “dator”, isn’t it? Its root is certainly “data”, but I like it better than the more cumbersome Norwegian word “datamaskin”.



I’ve always thought that dator was just a short form of datamaskin. But some other comments suggested otherwise, so I had to look it up. Apparently, dator is a made up word from 1968, from data and parallels the words tractor and doctor.


Yes, it's "dator". The word was initially proposed based on the same Latin -tor suffix as in e.g. doctor and tractor, so the word would fit just as well into English as it does in Swedish.


And in Danish we had "datamat", which has a nice ring to it. But everybody says "computer" instead.




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