A Dozen Words That Derive From Numbers (video)

11.03.2020 Nate Hoffelder 4 Comments

I was working on making an infographic on words that derive from numbers when I found the following video. (I was planning to crib from it, but I thought you’d get a kick out of it.)

You have probably heard the word quarantine a lot in the recent COVID-19 coverage, but did you know that it derives from the Latin word for forty?

Yes, the word was coined in Venice to describe the forty day period ships had to be isolated before they would be allowed to dock. The Venetian word for forty is quaranta, which has a Latin root.

There are a lot of words in English that derive from numbers – far more than you realize. For starters, there’s obvious words like bicycle, words which hardly count for this post because they were coined by combining a Latin number with another word. But then there are the months September through December, whose root words derive from the Latin words for seven through ten. (This makes more sense if you remember that December was the tenth month in the calendar back when the new year used to start on March first.)

BTW, if you know of a word that should be mentioned here but is not, could you tell me about it in the comments? (I will start the fun with a couple words I found.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDREk6wNZSs