Saturday, June 18, 2011

Nineteen

Nineteen \nahyn-teen\ , noun;
1. A cardinal number: ten plus nine (19)

The -teen that forms nineteen, as well as fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen comes from Old English -tene, which means "ten more than" based on ten. The suffix goes back to Proto-Germanic *tekhuniz, which is an inflected form of the root of *tekhan ("ten") from Proto-Indo-European *dekm ("ten")

No comments:

Post a Comment