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fourteen

UK/ˈfɔː.tiːn/US/ˈfɔɹ.tin/
nounA1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Fourteen is the number after thirteen. Two sevens, and half of twenty-eight.

It is the age at which a great many things become legally possible in Britain, including part-time work, and the age Juliet is in the play, which startles most modern readers. A fortnight is fourteen nights. In sonnets it is the number of lines, and every sonnet ever written has exactly that many, which is the whole constraint of the form.

Definitions of fourteen

  1. 1nounfourteenThe number after thirteen.A1

    “There were fourteen people at the table.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *fedurtehun

  2. Old English

    fēowertīene

  3. Middle English

    fourtene

  4. English, today

    fourteen

From Middle English fourtene, from Old English fēowertīene, from Proto-Germanic fedurtehun. Cognate with West Frisian fjirtjin, Dutch veertien, German vierzehn, Danish fjorten. Equivalent to four + -teen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

fourteen in the wild

  • Various sets can be found within the Pali and Sanskrit texts, with four, and ten (Pali texts) or fourteen (Sanskrit texts) unanswerable questions.

    The unanswerable questions

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.