Origins of The Term
The term "hash" comes by way of analogy with its non-technical meaning, to "chop and mix". Indeed, typical hash functions, like the mod operation, "chop" the input domain into many sub-domains that get "mixed" into the output range to improve the uniformity of the key distribution.
Donald Knuth notes that Hans Peter Luhn of IBM appears to have been the first to use the concept, in a memo dated January 1953, and that Robert Morris used the term in a survey paper in CACM which elevated the term from technical jargon to formal terminology.
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