Chapter 1: Risk communication in a democratic society. Perspective: Where nano came from

The etymology of the term nano and the family of compound neologisms it prefixes, as well as the sorts of material practices and social relations they signify, are shrouded in obscurity and uncertainty. Perhaps no other family of words in the English language is as misunderstood, exalted, parsed, or excoriated. Derived from the Greek word for ‘dwarf’, nano is the metric expression of a factor of 10-9 or (0.0000000001). As a unit of scale signifying one-billionth of a meter, the nanometer has become commonly used in many fields of science, engineering, and technology by the first decade of the twenty-first century to measure natural object and fabricated substances.