Our basic cardinal numbers are all based on Old English roots, which is not surprising. After all, it’s the most basic words that tend to stick around in languages, rather than being subject to borrowings. However, there are still a few interesting snippets to share about our words for numbers. One - Have you ever wondered about the odd pronunciation of one? Why does it begin with a w sound instead of rhyming with alone, which indeed derives from “all one” (c. 1300)? Other words that retain the original pronunciation in their “one” root include only and atone. I can’t tell you why the w sound was added, but it seems to have begun as a dialect shift around the 14th century in southwest and west England. It’s hard to trace its spread, since obviously the spelling came uncoupled with the pronunciation at some point.
Two - While one has a w sound that’s not seen in the spelling, two has a w in the spelling but not heard in the pronunciation! It used to be pronounced, as heard in twain, which is derived from the Old English masculine form of the number, while two derives from the feminine and neuter form.
Eleven - This word derives from roots meaning “one left.” Instead of forming 11 from “1 + 10” as many languages do, we’ve got something like “1 left = 11 - 10.” This is quite unusual and in the whole world it appears only in Germanic languages and in Lithuanian, which uses it for all the teens.
Twelve - Formed like eleven, this means “two left,” and also sounds that original w pronunciation of two. But why does English, unlike Lithuanian, stop this system after twelve? Probably because Old English originally had many elements of a duodecimal system, based on twelves instead of tens (as in inches to the foot, for example). Old English had words that would have come down to us as eleventy (110) and twelfty (120) if we’d continued that system, but these words were already fading before Middle English.
Dozen - This word for twelve, or specifically “a collection of 12 items or units” comes from Latin by way of Old French. The Latin roots break down to “2 [+] 10” which is a more normal way to build in a decimal system. Plus the -en ending is a French addition that indicates “exactly.” Which means that, etymologically speaking, there’s something oxymoronic about a “baker’s dozen” being something other than “exactly 10 plus 2.”
Thirteen - Here English gets into a more standard method of naming numbers. (By the way, that shift of the placement of the r also happened in third.) As for the -teen ending, that comes from the root for ten, but specifically indicates “ten more than.” (Interestingly, the word teen, meaning “a person aged 13-19,” dates to 1818, although it was not in common use before the 20th century. That means it came before the word teenager, which isn’t attested until 1922.)
Twenty - This derives from two (and there’s that w again) and -ty, which means “a group of ten.” Score - Another later Old English word for 20, this comes from Old Norse meaning “notch, incision.” This derives from the use of tally-marks for counting twenties. Counting by twenties, as opposed to tens or twelves, is more common in Celtic cultures, so the speakers of Old English presumably adopted this concept from Celtic languages. Our modern verb score, “to incise,” comes from this same root (but not until about 1400), as do all our various modern meanings of score such as “keeping track of the points in a game,” “a reckoning,” and even “printed piece of music,” from the sense of drawing all those lines.
Hundred - The simple version of 100 in Old English was simply hund. The -red piece comes from “reckoning, count.”
Century - From Latin meaning “group of one hundred,” century used to mean 100 of anything. Not until around the 1650s did it come to refer specifically to years.
Thousand - The end of this word comes from the OE hund meaning “100.” The thou- piece meant “huge, great, swollen.” So a thousand was originally just a really big number. It gained its more precise meaning when it was used as the English translation for Latin mille, meaning 1,000.
Million - A similar logic built million out of mille (1,000) plus a suffix meaning “big, great.” English got the word in the late 14th century from Old French, which got it from Latin, but it was used pretty much only by mathematicians for a couple of centuries before entering more common speech.
Count - Also in the late 14th century from Old French, English gained the word count, meaning “to enumerate, or to assign numerals in order.” It could also mean “to tell a story,” which we replaced in the late 15th century with recount. (If you put the stress on the second syllable, you tell a story. If you want to count again, you have to stress the first syllable.) The sense of “being of value” appeared in the mid 19th century.
So, that’s the word on English numbers! Do you have a favorite number? A lucky number? Hate math, or love it?
[Pictures: One potato and Two eggplants, potato prints by Diana Pomeroy from One Potato, 1996;
11 goose eggs, multi-block linocut by Christopher Wormell from Teeth, Tails, and Tentacles, 2004. More about these two books at prior post 5 Counting Books.]
