A piece of rubber or similar material used to remove pencil marks from paper.
From Latin 'eradere' meaning 'to scrape out' or 'to scratch away,' combining 'e-' (out) + 'radere' (to scrape). The same root gave us 'razor' for scraping hair and 'abrasive' for scraping surfaces. Romans literally thought of erasing as scraping away wax from their writing tablets with a stylus.
Every eraser is named after ancient Roman editing technique! Romans wrote on wax tablets and 'erased' by scraping the wax smooth again with the blunt end of their stylus. We kept the scraping word even though we switched from wax to rubber and paper.
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