Numbers hiding in ordinary words
English has many words that began as numbers and have since drifted away from counting. Some are obvious once pointed out, and others are hidden by sound changes. Looking at them shows how often people use a number as a shorthand for an idea such as a share, a duration or a distance, and then keep the word long after the original count has been forgotten.
Decimate
The Latin verb “decimare” comes from “decimus”, meaning tenth, and “decem”, ten. In the Roman army it is traditionally described as a severe punishment in which one soldier in ten, chosen by lot, was put to death after a unit had been guilty of cowardice or mutiny. The word entered English in this narrow sense, and for some time meant to take or kill a tenth.
The meaning later widened. “Decimate” was also used, at times, for a tax of one tenth. In modern English it usually means to destroy a large portion of something, and it is often used for any severe reduction. Some careful writers object to this broader use and prefer the original sense of “a tenth”, while others point out that the wider meaning is now the common one. Both sides can be described accurately: the word began with a specific fraction and has since become a general word for heavy loss.
Quarantine
“Quarantine” comes from the Italian “quaranta”, forty, through forms such as “quarantena” and “quaranta giorni”, forty days. The usual account is that Mediterranean ports in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and Venice, required ships and travellers from places affected by plague to wait in isolation before landing. The waiting period is traditionally described as thirty days at first and later forty.
Forty was a number with strong resonance in the region, appearing in many religious contexts, such as the number forty in biblical stories and the Turkish forty customs found in the Middle East. Whether the forty-day period was chosen because of that resonance, or for practical reasons, is not clear from the evidence, and different writers have suggested different answers. In English the word was first used for the isolation period itself and later for the process of isolating people or animals in general, without reference to any number of days.
Words for time and distance
Several everyday time words are old number words.
- “Fortnight” is a contraction of the Old English “feowertyne niht”, fourteen nights. It reflects an older habit of reckoning time in nights, not days.
- “Sennight” is an old word for a week, from “seven nights”. It is mostly found in older writing.
- “September”, “October”, “November” and “December” come from Latin words for seven, eight, nine and ten. They are the wrong numbers for their position in our year, because the old Roman calendar began the year in March.
For distance, “mile” comes from the Latin “mille passuum”, a thousand paces, in the Roman measure. A pace here meant two steps, from one foot landing to the same foot landing again, so the mile was a thousand double steps. The modern mile is a different length from the Roman one, but the name preserves the original count.
Fractions in disguise
Some words started as fractions.
- “Tithe” comes from an Old English word meaning tenth, from the same family as “ten”. It was the tenth of income or produce given to support the church.
- “Dime” comes from French “disme” and Latin “decima”, a tenth, because the coin is a tenth of a dollar.
- “Cent” and “percent” come from Latin “centum”, a hundred, so a percentage is literally “per hundred”.
- “Ounce” and “inch” both come from the Latin “uncia”, a twelfth part, which was applied to both a twelfth of a pound and a twelfth of a foot. That shared origin links two units that are otherwise unrelated, and it fits with the importance of twelve described under duodecimal counting.
- “Quarter” comes from a Latin word for a fourth part, and “quart” is a fourth of a gallon.
Whole numbers inside small words
A few short words contain “one” and are hidden by sound change.
- “Alone” is “all one”, meaning completely by oneself.
- “Atone” is “at one”, to be at one with someone, which is why the word means to make amends and reconcile.
- “None” is “ne one”, not one.
- “Once” and “twice” are old genitive forms with an added “-s” that became spelled “-ce”.
These are small cases, but they show that an ordinary word can be a compound of a number and another word, worn down to the point that it no longer looks like either.
Words with numbers that are easy to miss
- “Unicorn” is Latin for one horn, and “bicycle” and “tricycle” count wheels.
- “Quintessence” literally means fifth essence, from the medieval and ancient idea of a fifth element beyond the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
- “Dozen” comes from Old French “dozaine”, from “douze”, twelve, and the custom of the bakers dozen adds one to it.
- “Trivial” is often explained as coming from Latin words meaning “three roads”, a place where roads meet and where common talk happens. This is a traditional explanation and not everyone treats it as certain.
- “Million” comes from Italian “milione”, an augmented form of “mille”, thousand, so it means roughly “big thousand”.
- “Century”, “centurion” and “cent” all come from a hundred, and “Roman numerals” such as C for a hundred still reflect the same root.
How meanings drift
The words above show a few patterns. A number can become a specific rule, as with decimate, and then loosen into a general idea. A number can become a standard period, as with quarantine, and then name the practice. A number can disappear into the spelling of a short word, as with alone. And some number-words keep a count that no longer matches the real quantity, such as the months and the mile.
Drift of this kind is ordinary in language. A word keeps working as long as people understand what it refers to, even if the starting point is forgotten. Most speakers never think of “fortnight” as fourteen nights or “dime” as a tenth, and the words do their jobs anyway.
Etymologies are not always certain, and popular stories about word origins are often wrong. The examples here are among the better-supported ones, but where a traditional explanation is disputed, it has been marked as such.