Probably very late to this party but I just learned why squaring a number (multiplying it by it self, so like 6Ă—6) is called squaring! It's because the length of one side of the square, times that same number (the length of all the sides of the square), equals the area of the square.
Mind. blown.
And the reason we care about THAT is, in origin, because circles are mysterious and challenging, but squares are easy to measure and understand, so when you put a square inside a circle to where the corner points are all touching the circle, you can use the square to precisely measure the circle. So like, to understand how much room is in a grain silo, for instance.













