Other forms: fours
Four is the number after three — the number of legs on a dog or a table. Four children, four o'clock, in four days.
The ordinal is fourth, which keeps the u, while forty does not — that is one of the commonest spelling mistakes in English. Four is everywhere in fixed phrases: on all fours, four-letter word, the four corners of the earth, a four-poster bed, four-wheel drive. In cricket, a four is a boundary shot worth four runs. Note foursome, quarter and quadruple, which all mean groups of four by other roots.
1numberfourThe number after three.
“There were four of them and one umbrella.”
four is a number.
Old English feower descends from Proto-Indo-European kwetwor, which also gives Latin quattuor and Greek tessares. The English f against Latin qu is the regular Germanic sound shift, the same one that turns Latin quis into who.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷetwóres
Middle English
four
English, today
four
From Middle English four. From Middle English four, from Old English fēower, from Proto-West Germanic feuwar, from Proto-Germanic fedwōr, from previous pre-Grimm petwṓr, from Proto-Indo-European kʷetwṓr, the neuter form of kʷetwóres. a doublet of cuatro and quatre. Cognates include Scots fower, stq fjauer, West Frisian fjouwer, Dutch vier, German Low German veer, German vier, Norwegian Bokmål - and Danish fire, Swedish fyra, Gothic 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂 and, more distantly, Latin quattuor (whence Spanish cuatro, French quatre), Ancient Greek τέσσαρες, Irish ceathair, Welsh pedwar, Armenian չորս, Lithuanian keturi, Albanian katër, Sanskrit चतुर्.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA