What’s A Nonius?

A Hackaday writer traces the origin of the term 'nonius', found used oddly in a GOWIN software manual to describe a waveform display's vertical marker lines. The investigation uncovers that 'nonius' was the original term for what we now call the vernier scale, named after 16th-century Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes (Latinized as Petrus Nonius), who devised a concentric-circle measurement system for astrolabes in 1542 - predating Pierre Vernier's 1631 version. The piece concludes the manual's odd usage likely stems from a Chinese-to-English translation mix-up, since the Chinese term 游标 can mean cursor, vernier, or nonius.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/10/14/whats-a-nonius. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.