In physics we would in English use the terms speed and velocity differently:
- Speed is a number (magnitude).
- Velocity is a vector (magnitude and direction).
In English this is traditional from more than a hundred years ago.
This is the case in several languages as well, such as the Nordic ones (fart and hastighed/t) as well as French (vitesse and vélocité) and Spanish (rapidez and velocidad). It turns out to not be the case in German (they have only one: Geschwindigkeit) and I heard something about Russian as well, which might only have one word for both: скорость.
Can anyone confirm this?
I am writing about the origin of these technical terms, and am doing this research to have a proper understanding on their use across languages/cultures.