The word we say a thousand times without thinking, pixel, is a survivor of a small linguistic contest. It is a squeezed-down form of picture element, the smallest addressable dot that a picture can be broken into, and it came out of the image-processing work being done in the 1960s at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where engineers were learning to treat photographs as grids of numbers rather than continuous scenes.

The first appearance in print is commonly credited to Frederic Billingsley, in 1965. That hedge matters: attributions like this are less a matter of certainty than of consensus, the earliest sighting anyone has managed to pin down rather than a documented birth. Words tend to slip into use before anyone thinks to record them, and pixel may well have been spoken in a lab before it was ever typed on a page.

What is clearer is that pixel had a rival. For a while the field also used pel, another abbreviation of the same picture element, and for a time it was not obvious which contraction would stick. Pel turned up in technical writing and image-format specifications, a lean little word with every right to win. But language rewards the version that sounds friendlier in the mouth, and pixel, with its softer shape, gradually pushed pel to the margins until it survives only in a few dusty corners of documentation. So the next time you count pixels, spare a thought for the two names that once competed for the job, and for the picture element that quietly beat its shorter twin.