The building blocks of English
Affixes
-mo
Book sizes.
The final syllable of the masculine ablative singular of Latin ordinal numbers.
Book sizes are determined by the number of leaves into which a sheet of paper has been folded. Older examples are formed on Latin ordinal numbers, such as duodecimo (Latin in duodecimo, in a twelfth, from duodecimus, twelfth), a size of book in which each leaf is one twelfth of the size of the printing sheet. More recently, equivalent terms have been formed using English cardinal numbers: twelvemo, sixteenmo, thirty-two-mo.
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