One way to hold this word is to notice what sits inside it: centre. Eccentricity can then be thought of as a way of measuring how far something sits from the middle. With people, the middle is what everyone around them does, and a person who dresses, works and thinks off to one side of it has eccentricity. With shapes, the middle is a perfect circle, and the further a curve or an orbit is stretched away from that, the higher its eccentricity. With networks, the middle is the point that can reach everything easily, and a point far out at the edge has a high one. Different fields, one picture: not in the centre, and by how much.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary records eccentricity as borrowed from Latin eccentricitas, and analyses the modern word as eccentric plus -ity. The packet does not go further back, so nothing more is claimed here.
Wiktionary 記載 eccentricity 借自拉丁文 eccentricitas，並把現代這個字拆成 eccentric 加 -ity。證據只到這裡，所以更早的來源不在此多作推論。
packet evidence: Wiktionary etymology_text for eccentricity (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1148813633:18922)
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。