Five is the number after four: the fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot. Five minutes, a five-pound note, the five on a dice with four corners and one dot in the middle.
It works in front of a noun — five apples, five o'clock, a five-year-old — and on its own as the name of the number: write a five, add the fives together. The family it heads changes shape, so the spelling turns to fif- in fifth, fifteen and fifty. A high five is the flat-palmed slap two people trade when something goes right, and take five means take a short break. Five-a-side is football with small teams and small goals.
1nounfiveThe number 5.~11%
“Add a five to the total and round it up.”
2adjectiveamountingAmounting to five in number.~89%
“She waited five minutes and then left.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 27 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
five is a number.
Five is Old English fīf, from Proto-Germanic *fimf and the Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe — the same ancestor as Latin quinque, Welsh pump and Lithuanian penki. English lost the m through a sound change called the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, which is why German still says fünf while English says five. Even punch, the drink, belongs to the same family.
Proto-Indo-European
*pénkʷe
Middle English
fyf
English, today
five
From Middle English fyf. From Middle English fyf, fyve, from Old English fīf (“five”), from Proto-West Germanic fimf (“five”), from Proto-Germanic fimf (“five”), from Proto-Indo-European pénkʷe. See also West Frisian fiif, Dutch vijf, German fünf, Norwegian - and Swedish fem, Icelandic fimm; also Welsh pump, Latin quinque, xto päñ, txb piś, Lithuanian penki, Russian пять, Albanian pesë, Ancient Greek πέντε, Armenian հինգ, Persian پنج, Sanskrit पञ्च. a doublet of cinque and fin and finnuf and pimp and ponzu and punch and sengi; related to Pompeii.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA