Word origin · etymology
English lot, from Old English hlot, an object used to decide someone’s share.
A Lot is the share or portion assigned to a topic. The label Arabic parts is a later Latin-medieval one for the same points, which Valens and Dorotheus already used, so it names the route by which they reached Latin readers and not who devised them. No Greek word is given here because none was checked in a primary text.[3][4]
How we know · epistemology
Ancient textual formulas with disagreeing authors
A Lot is arithmetic on three longitudes, so the position follows from the formula, the author and the rule for day and night; the formulas, the names and the night rules differ between authors, and for some of Dorotheus’s Lots the night case rests on the translator’s square brackets. What a Lot signifies is the tradition’s claim, not a measured property of a person or evidence of an outcome.[1][2]
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Connected concepts
Sources & provenance
The numbers in the text point to this list; it distinguishes a calculation convention, a historical teaching and an editorial example.