Which prefixes determine the number to be two

Related Resources. It's Latin, and it's not a dead language, as Search our growing library of professionally created teacher resources. When you are able to commit a numerical prefix to memory, it becomes much easier to decipher the meaning of unfamiliar words that use that prefix. If you know that "tri" represents the number three, then it's easy to figure out that " tricycle " is something that has three wheels. Listed below are several of the most common number prefixes, along with the number they represent and some example words that contain that numerical prefix.

Note that some numbers have more than one prefix. This is because English draws from both Greek and Latin influences, and those languages have two different numbering systems - both of which are used for English prefixes.

I'll stick to listing the numerical bases and adjectives of relation, and let you figure out the rest on your own, on the pattern described above.

Most of the other terms aren't found in dictionaries how often do you need to describe something that recurs every 60 years? To wit:. Now, things get complicated. For the teens, things are made complex by the fact that instead of "duodeviginti" literally 'two-from-twenty' and "undeviginti" 'one-from-twenty' for 18 and 19, the prefixes for them are 'decennoct' ten-eight and 'decennov' ten-nine.

And, what's this? Hexadecimal, not "sexadecimal"? I suspect, again, that prudishness has led to "hexadecimal" getting the nod over "sexadecimal". Actually, other than "hexadecimal", all these words for 13 through 19 are extremely rare to non-existent, so it might be best to just forget about them.

Moving on to the decades, most of these are also quite rare. However, many nouns exist, derived from the appropriate adjectives of relation, which identify a person of a particular age; "octogenary" becomes "octogenarian" - someone in their eighties.

For the higher Greek numbers, there's almost no evidence in English for the use of these words, but mathematicians sometimes need words for polygons and solid figures, so here are the appropriate prefixes and words for , and The ancient Greek teens all contain the conjunction kai "and", but except for 13 and 14, the prefixes used in English normally omit it.

Cardinal, Ordinal, and Nominal Numbers. Mean and Median.