Nommer le matériel informatique en français

Where does the French word “ordinateur” come from?

French does not say “computer”: it says un ordinateur, and the word was chosen deliberately. In April 1955 IBM France went looking for an alternative to the English term, which sounded too much like a mere calculating machine, and asked a Sorbonne philologist, Jacques Perret. He proposed ordinateur — from the idea of one who puts things in order — and it stuck.

The word already existed as a rarity, listed in Littré as an adjective for God as the one who orders the world — Perret’s proposal revived it for the machine. In speech people shorten it to un ordi.