The English language has a number of words that denote specific or approximate quantities that are themselves not numbers. [1] Along with numerals, and special-purpose words like some, any, much, more, every, and all, they are Quantifiers. Quantifiers are a kind of determiner and occur in many constructions with other determiners, like articles: e.g., two dozen or more than a score. Scientific non-numerical quantities are represented as SI units.
| Name | Quantity | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Brace | 2 | An old term of venery, meaning means ‘a pair of [some animal, especially birds] caught in the hunt’. Also a measure of length, originally representing a person's outstretched arms. |
| Couple | 2 | A set of two of items of a type |
| Century | 100 | Primarily denotes one hundred years, but occasionally used, especially in the context of competitive racing, to refer to something consisting of one hundred, as in a 100-mile race. |
| Dozen | 12 | A collection of twelve things or units from Old French dozaine "a dozen, a number of twelve" in various usages, from doze (12c.) [2] |
| Baker's dozen | 13 | From the notion that a baker would include an extra item in a batch of twelve so as not to be accused of shortchanging a customer |
| Half-dozen | 6 | Six of something |
| Decade | 10 | Primarily denotes ten years, but occasionally refers to ten of something |
| Duo | 2 | In reference to people engaged in an endeavor together, as in musical performance (other words denote three or more people in the same context: trio, quartet, etc.) |
| Grand | 1,000 | Slang for a thousand of some unit of currency, such as dollars or pounds. |
| Gross | 144 | Twelve dozen |
| Score | 20 | Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from one to twenty, and making a score or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty. [3] [4] A distance of twenty yards in ancient archery and gunnery. [5] |
| Large | 1,000 | Slang for one thousand |
| Myriad | 10,000 | Loosely refers to a very large quantity |
| Pair | 2 | Often in reference to identical objects |
| Trio | 3 | Referring to people working or collaborating especially in musical performance |
| Few | 3 | Small number of something |
| Quartet | 4 | Referring to people working or collaborating especially in musical performance |
| Great gross | 1,728 | A dozen gross (12x144) |
| Hat-trick | 3 | The achievement of, a generally positive feat, three times in a game, or another achievement based on the number three [6] |
| Several | 3 | Three or more but not many. |
| Small gross | 120 | Ten dozen (10x12) [7] |
| Great hundred | 120 | Ten dozen (10x12) or six score (6x20), also known as long-hundred or twelfty [8] [9] |
| None | 0 | Zero |
In linguistics, a numeral in the broadest sense is a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity. Some theories of grammar use the word "numeral" to refer to cardinal numbers that act as a determiner that specify the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats". Some theories of grammar do not include determiners as a part of speech and consider "two" in this example to be an adjective. Some theories consider "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assign all numbers to a part of speech called "numerals". Numerals in the broad sense can also be analyzed as a noun, as a pronoun, or for a small number of words as an adverb.
In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, we is a plural, first-person pronoun.
Many languages have words expressing indefinite and fictitious numbers—inexact terms of indefinite size, used for comic effect, for exaggeration, as placeholder names, or when precision is unnecessary or undesirable. One technical term for such words is "non-numerical vague quantifier". Such words designed to indicate large quantities can be called "indefinite hyperbolic numerals".
The Online Etymology Dictionary or Etymonline, sometimes abbreviated as OED, is a free online dictionary that describes the origins of English words, written and compiled by Douglas R. Harper.
In French, articles and determiners are required on almost every common noun, much more so than in English. They are inflected to agree in gender and number with the noun they determine, though most have only one plural form. Many also often change pronunciation when the word that follows them begins with a vowel sound.
"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, included in his anthology "All One Universe". It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.
One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body", the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself.
In Modern English, she is a singular, feminine, third-person pronoun.
A determiner, also called determinative, is a term used in some traditions of grammatical description. It refers to a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, possessive determiners, cardinal numerals, quantifiers, distributive determiners, and interrogative determiners.
In Modern English, I is the singular, first-person pronoun.
The articles in English are the definite article the and the indefinite articles a and an. They are the two most common determiners. The definite article is the default determiner when the speaker believes that the listener knows the identity of a common noun's referent. The indefinite article is the default determiner for other singular, countable, common nouns, while no determiner is the default for other common nouns. Other determiners are used to add semantic information such as amount, proximity, or possession.
English determiners are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and numerals such as six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed lexical category in English.
In literature, symbolic language refers to the use of words, phrases, or characters to represent or reference concepts. Symbolic language may be used to communicate meaning or produce effects such as emotions or feelings that are not directly stated.
Trillion is a number with two distinct definitions:
