Where do the names for numbers come from?
Five may be a fist. Eleven means one left over. Zero is a newcomer. The names we count with are the oldest words in the language, and they remember how we learned to count.
Number words feel too plain to have a history. They are the first words we learn and the last we would ever think to question. Yet they are, quietly, the oldest words we have, and each one carries a small record of how human beings first worked out how to count.
The oldest words we own
Say three. A Roman said trēs, a Greek treis, and an ancient speaker of Sanskrit in India said trayas, and all four are the same word, inherited from a single language spoken thousands of years before any of them. Numbers are almost never borrowed and almost never replaced, which is why they survive so long and match so closely across languages that otherwise share nothing. When linguists first noticed that the number words lined up from Iceland to India, it was one of the clues that revealed a whole hidden family tree of languages.
Five is a fist
Before we had symbols, we counted on our bodies, and the words still show the fingerprints. Many linguists think fist comes from the ancient word for five: the five fingers, bunched into one. The same instinct runs all through the vocabulary of counting. A digit is a number and also a finger, from the Latin for finger. To calculate comes from calculus, Latin for a little pebble, because counting was once done by moving stones.
Five also shows off a sound change on its own. The Latin quinque and the Greek pente are the very same word as English five: an old p sound hardened into an f all across the Germanic languages, which is the same shift that turned pater into father and pes into foot.
One left, two left
Here is a puzzle hiding in plain sight. Why eleven and twelve, and not something tidy like “one-teen” and “two-teen”? Because those two words are older and stranger than the rest. Eleven began as “one left,” and twelve as “two left”: one and two left over, once you have counted all ten fingers and set the first handful aside. They are the sound of someone counting to ten, running out of fingers, and carrying on.
From thirteen the pattern gives up and gets regular. Thirteen is simply “three-ten,” and thirty is “three tens.” The endings -teen and -ty are both just worn-down forms of ten.
Twenty toes and a dozen eggs
We say we count in tens, but the language remembers other habits. A score is twenty, from an old word for a notch cut into a tally stick, with a deeper notch at every twentieth. It is a leftover of counting by twenties, fingers and toes together. French still does this out loud: eighty is quatre-vingts, “four twenties.”
Twelve leaves fossils too. A dozen comes from the Latin for “two and ten,” and a gross is a dozen dozen. We buy eggs in twelves, keep twelve hours on a clock, and twelve months in a year, all traces of an old fondness for a number that divides more neatly than ten.
The number that means nothing
The strangest number word is the one for nothing. Zero is a latecomer, and English took a long time to accept that “nothing” was a number worth naming. When the word finally arrived, it came a very long way. Zero and cipher are the same word, both from the Arabic sifr, “empty,” which was itself a translation of the Sanskrit shunya, “void.” The idea travelled from India through the Arab world to Europe, carrying its meaning intact: a name for the absence of anything at all.
So the words we count with are a portable museum. They hold the memory of counting on fingers, in handfuls of ten, in scores of twenty, and finally with a borrowed symbol for nothing. Numbers may be the plainest words we know, but they are among the most honest records we have of how the human mind first learned to reckon, and half the fun is watching the connections light up once you start looking.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.