Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Sine and cosine" in English language version.
The English word "sine" comes from a series of mistranslations of the Sanskrit jyā-ardha (chord-half). Āryabhaṭa frequently abbreviated this term to jyā or its synonym jīvá. When some of the Hindu works were later translated into Arabic, the word was simply transcribed phonetically into an otherwise meaningless Arabic word jiba. But since Arabic is written without vowels, later writers interpreted the consonants jb as jaib, which means bosom or breast. In the twelfth century, when an Arabic trigonometry work was translated into Latin, the translator used the equivalent Latin word sinus, which also meant bosom, and by extension, fold (as in a toga over a breast), or a bay or gulf.