I saw a question on the Internet asking why isn’t the number 11 pronounced onety-one?
I’ve heard that many times before and always considered it what it is — a joke, not a serious question.
But since it’s a slow day, I thought I’d ponder it a bit.
The question actually should be, why do we say eleven and twelve instead of firsteen and secondteen? After ten, it’s the “teens” all the way up to twenty. The next number after twelve is thirteen — the third teen, then fourteen, the fourth teen, and so on. So why skip the first two and name them eleven and twelve?
Well, our counting system is based on ten. The terms twenty, thirty, etc. are derived from compound words meaning “two tens,” three tens,” etc. I suppose there wasn’t a need for “one ten” because there was already the word “ten.”
So maybe the real question is why do we have this odd set of numbers from eleven to nineteen? Really the numbers thirteen to nineteen aren’t that odd because they mean three and ten, four and ten, and so on. They’re kind of in a reverse order to numbers like twenty three, but the principle is the same.
But that eleven and twelve is still a puzzlement. During my extensive research, I turned to the dictionary and found that eleven comes from Old English endleofan that literally means “one left.” Twelve comes from Old English twelf, meaning “two left.”
I’m not sure how this all fits together, but maybe it goes back to people using their fingers to count. If you count something using your fingers, and get all the way up to ten and there’s one thing left over, that’s eleven — if you have two things left over — twelve.
So I really con’t know how eleven and twelve got their names in our numbering system. Maybe people just started using them and they became part of our language/numbers — sometimes that’s just the way things happen……
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