This form of the word for ten eventually evolved into Modern English -teen. ![]() The English words that end in -teen descend from compounds formed in the Germanic protolanguage from the words for the numbers three through nine added to a form of the Germanic word for ten. But what about the words eleven and twelve? Eleven doesn't sound anything like one, and although twelve is spelled with the same tw- found in two, twice, and twin, what is the -elve? English probably inherited all the words for the numbers eleven through nineteen from Germanic, the protolanguage that is the common ancestor of English and its close relatives, the other Germanic languages like Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. The thir- in thirteen, for example, sounds somewhat like three, and the suffix -teen resembles ten. ![]() ![]() Word History: It is fairly easy to see how the words for the numbers thirteen through nineteen are related to the numbers three through nine.
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