Why is eleven pronounced

This article today will be talking about numbers. I know that some of you might be thinking that this is supposed to be an article about English, not maths, but actually, the two are closer than you might think.

The concept of 1 thing or two things has been around even before humans were to give them names, it could even be argued that numbers were around even before the universe itself, but something that only came about with the rise of humans is naming numbers. One number that seems to break all the rules is eleven. If the English language was consistent, surely it would be called onety one. The numbers from are the base numbers from which others numbers are made up of. This allows us to have a clear understanding of how numbers go up, and what number will come up after every number.

It would be impossible to count to higher numbers. Tagged With: Numbers. Get more comfortable with the pronunciation of numbers. YouTube blocked? Click here to see the video. So that would be either eleven or eleven. In fact, the original meaning of these two words was "one left" and "two left" after counting to ten.

As for why "eleven" and "twelve" did not end up simply conforming to the "teen" pattern. That's why the "irregular" past tense verb forms -- had, were, went, etc-- and irregular plural forms --men, mice, geese-- are almost always found with simple, common words. Of course, there were some alternative forms out there. We still use an alternative word for twelve -- "do-zen" itself shows us that compare German "zehn" -- though it has gained its own special use for a GROUPING of twelve.

In fact, the fact that many things were divided into units of twelve also helps explain why eleven and twelve were treated differently.

Nein-Nein posted over a year ago. You asked a question, so I searched for the facts. This isn't an opinionated question, this is a question with a solid answer that we can search for. So the short answer is, we created words for 11 and 12 a long time ago by calling them "one left after ten" and "two left after ten. Kids always notice the weird bits about language better than grownups.

Thanks to five-year-old Katie English for this fabulous question! BY Arika Okrent. See Also Big Questions language Words.