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

• þūsendfeald

Descendants

• Middle English: thusand, thousand, thousend
  • English: thousand
    • → Hawaiian: kaukani, tausani
  • Scots: thousand, thoosan, thoosand