Numerical Prefixes

The numerical prefixes in the English Language typically come to us via Latin or Greek.

What's more, they show a degree of precision that shouldn't be confused once you know what the number prefixes mean.

For instance, when a country celebrates its Centennial, we know that it's one hundred years old because 'cent' comes from 'centum' meaning one hundred.

But what about centenarian? The word, of course, means a person who is 100 years old.

Now, what about words like Pentecost? Not everyone knows that it means fiftieth. The more common words with numerical prefixes are words we use without even realising that they have a number prefix.

Words like decade, bicycle, quadracep, monorail and century all have number prefixes giving a good indication as to what the words mean.

The following is meant to aid you in your understanding of the Enlgish Language.

Numerical Prefixes Meanings and Usage

1 mono, uni 2 di, bi 3 tri 4 tetra, quad 5 penta, quint 6 hexa, sex 7 hepta, sept 8 octa, octo 9 ennea, novem 10 deca 20 icosa 30 triaconta 40 tetraconta 50 penteconta 60 hexeconta 70 evdomiconta 80 ogdoiconta 90 enneaconta 100 hecato cent milli kilo mega giga tera

one, only two three four five six seven eight nine ten twenty thirty forty fifty sixty seventy eighty ninety one hundred one hundred thousand thousand million billion trillion

monorail, unicycle dichotomy, bicycle triathlon, tricycle tetrachord, quadracycle pentagon, quintuplets hexagon, sextuplets heptathlon, September octopus, octogenarian enneagram, November decade century millenium kilobyte megabyte gigabyte terabyte

To go to a wiki page containing many more numerical prefixes simply click on the preceding link.

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