þusend

Middle English

Numeral

þusend

  1. (Early Middle English) Alternative form of thousend

Old English

Old English numbers (edit)
[a], [b], [c]   100  ←  900 1,000
100[a], [b], [c]
    Cardinal: þūsend
    Multiplier: þūsendfeald

Etymology

From Proto-Germanic *þūsundī.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈθuː.send/, [ˈθuː.zend]

Numeral

þūsend

  1. thousand

Usage notes

  • Where a modern English speaker would say “x hundred and y thousand,” the Anglo-Saxons said “x hundred thousand and y thousand”. For example, 186,000 was hund þūsenda and six and hundeahtatiġ þūsenda, literally “a hundred thousand and eighty-six thousand.”
  • The ordinal form of þūsend is unknown, as no word for “thousandth” is attested until Early Modern English. The only likely possibility is *þūsendoþa [ˈθuːzendoθɑ], which would match modern English thousandth, as well as all lower ordinal numbers ending in “twentieth” or higher, which also use the suffix -oþa.
  • The gender and declension of þūsend vary widely. The word is often a feminine ō-stem (the inherited declension, since the jō-stems merged with the ō-stems, mostly by regular sound change), often a neuter a-stem, and often undeclined. When undeclined, it can be either feminine or neuter.
  • Old English had no word for million. Instead þūsend þūsenda ("a thousand thousand") or þūsend sīðum þūsend ("a thousand times a thousand") were used.

Derived terms

Descendants

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