When people in Great Britain began speaking Old English, “thousand” was likely the biggest number word available. “Taxi” is sometimes credited as a universal word, as are variants of “mom” and “dad,” but “million” may not be far off. But that big clan over the hill? Their ranks were deep enough for a “strong hundred,” at least. A hundred was perhaps enough to tally the members of our group. ’” The composite nature of the word makes it plausible that “thousand” emerged from “hundred,” as the need for it grew. As two British mathematicians put it in The Book of Numbers, “A ‘thousand’ is literally a ‘ strong hundred. Etymological dictionaries suggest that our word “thousand” originated as a magnification of a lesser one: “hundred.” The Oxford English Dictionary relates that the first half of “ thousand” is rooted in the Indo-European “tus”-meaning “multitude” or “force”-while the latter half is related to that smaller number. In the case of English, some new number words were often created by amplifying smaller ones. “I’ve never encountered anything like that whenever I’ve looked at the grammar of little-studied languages.” “I don’t know a language where there would be a word for a large number without there being a use for it,” Mester says.
Though the runway of numeracy is infinite, number words, like words in general, were created as needed, as people began thinking and talking about bigger quantities. In millennia past, number words (like one, two, thousand, and million) seem to have been coined progressively rather than all at once. Armin Mester, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says, “Thousand, one can imagine that there was a use for that, in terms of amount of money. In the Anglo-Saxon world, no object was made, and few were discussed, in such quantities. Why would that concise word be absent in earlier language? It seems that there was no word for million in Old English simply because its speakers had no great use for it.
Some Anglo-Saxon writers understood the idea of a million, and they had a term for it: a “thousand thousand.” But, unlike the speakers of most modern languages, they had no single word for that quantity.
Battle of Hastings, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. I would cut off my right hand if you find it.” That was the guarantee retired Columbia history lecturer Jens Ulff-Møller made that there was no word for “million” in Old English, a medieval predecessor of the language you’re currently reading.