The time unit minute is first attested in English in the late 1300s, a borrowing from Old French minute, which is in turn borrowed from Medieval Latin minūta. The story of minūta is where it gets interesting. In Classical Latin, that word only means “very small”. The “small” sense of minute was actually borrowed into English later, in the mid-1400s.

So going all the way back, the Sumerian numeral system was written in base 60, or sexagesimal. We have written evidence for that going back 5,000 years. The Babylonians adopted their own base-60 system thousands of years later due to Sumerian influence. So it happened that Babylonian astronomy, which was developed 2,700 years ago and heavily influenced Greek, Arabic, and Indian astronomy, used a base-60 numeral system. One way this manifested was that they divided circles into 360 degrees, and when they needed subdivisions, each further subdivision was into 60 parts.

Hundreds of years later, when translating Greek astronomy into Latin, the subdivisions of degrees came to be called pars minuta prima, “first small part”. The next subdivisions were pars minuta secunda, “second small part”, and pars minuta tertia, “third small part”. So when measuring very small fractions of a circle, as in astronomy or latitude/longitude, you used degrees, minutes, and seconds for precision. Today we say New York is at 40.7128° N owing to the invention of digital calculators, but just a hundred years ago you’d instead write 40°42′46″ N.

But that pars minuta prima only refers to measurements of arc, not time. Subdividing an hour into 60 parts first happened much, much later, in the الآثار الباقية عن القرون الخالية (Kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiyah `an al-qurūn al-khāliyah) “The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries”, an influential comparative history of timekeeping, written in 1000 by Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. This subdivision of the hour into 60 parts only makes it into Medieval Latin in 1267, thanks to Roger Bacon.

It blows my mind that there wasn’t a standard unit of time smaller than an hour for so long! The first clock with a minute hand wasn’t constructed until 1577!