Other forms: eights
Eight is the number after seven and before nine — the legs of a spider, the sides of a stop sign, the notes in an octave counting both ends.
The spelling is the difficulty: eight sounds like ate and is written with a gh that does nothing. Its family follows the same pattern and mostly behaves — eighth is the ordinal and is the only English ordinal that drops a letter rather than adding one, eighteen is the teen, eighty is the ten. Note eighth in particular: one t, not two, and the th is said cleanly after the ay.
1nouneightThe number 8.~69%
“A spider has eight legs.”
2nounoclockEight o'clock.~2%
“Doors open at eight.”
3nounrowingIn rowing, a boat with eight rowers, or its crew.~29%
“She rowed in the college eight.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
eight is a number.
Old English eahta goes back through Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European *oktow, which also gives Latin octo and Greek okto — and so English October, which was the eighth month before the Roman calendar was rearranged and left the name behind on the tenth.
Proto-Indo-European
*oḱtṓw
Middle English
eighte
English, today
eight
From Middle English eighte. From Middle English eighte, aught, eahte, ahte, from Old English eahta, from Proto-West Germanic ahtō, from Proto-Germanic ahtōu, from Proto-Indo-European oḱtṓw. Cognate with Scots aucht (“eight”), West Frisian acht (“eight”), Dutch acht (“eight”), Low German acht (“eight”), German acht (“eight”), Norwegian åtte (“eight”), Swedish åtta (“eight”), Icelandic átta (“eight”), Latin octo (“eight”), Ancient Greek ὀκτώ, Irish ocht (“eight”), among others. எட்டு, എട്ട്.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA