Odd means strange in a way you cannot quite put your finger on. An odd smell in the hallway, an odd silence at the dinner table, a neighbour who is friendly one day and looks straight through you the next.
Odd is also a number word: 1, 3, 5 and 7 are odd, because they will not split into two equal halves, while 2, 4 and 6 are even. From that comes odd meaning left over or unmatched, as in odd socks or the odd glove at the back of the drawer. Odd jobs are small unrelated bits of work, and the odd something means now and then, as in she has the odd cigarette at parties. Stuck onto a number it means a bit more than that: thirty-odd people came. The plural noun odds is a different animal altogether, since the odds are the chances of something happening.
1adjectiveoddStrange or unusual in a way that puzzles you.~2%
“There was an odd smell coming from the fridge.”
2adjectiveableOf a number: not able to be divided into two equal whole parts.~78%
“The houses with odd numbers are on the left side of the street.”
3adjectivepairLeft over from a pair or a set; not matching.~9%
“He came down to breakfast in two odd socks.”
4adjectivehappeningHappening now and then rather than regularly.~9%
“She does the odd shift at the cafe when they are short-staffed.”
5adjectiveplacedPlaced after a number: a little more than that number.~2%
“Forty-odd people turned up, which was odd for a wet Tuesday.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Odd came from Old Norse oddi, which meant a point, a triangle, and a third or extra number, from oddr, the point of a weapon. A triangle has one corner left over once the other two have paired off, so the odd number was the one sticking out. English kept the leftover and then let it drift, because what is unmatched starts to look strange.
Proto-Indo-European
*wes- — to stick, prick, pierce, sting
Proto-Germanic
*uzdaz — point
Old Norse
oddi — odd, third or additional number; triangle
Middle English
odde
English, today
odd
Built from
From Middle English odde, od (“odd (not even); leftover after division into pairs”), from Old Norse oddi (“odd, third or additional number; triangle”), from oddr (“point of a weapon”), from Proto-Germanic uzdaz (“point”), from Proto-Indo-European wes- (“to stick, prick, pierce, sting”) + dʰeh₁- (“to set, place”). Cognate to Icelandic oddi (“triangle, point of land, odd number”), Swedish udda (“odd”), udd (“a point”), Danish od (“point of weapon”) and odde (“a headland, point”), Norwegian Bokmål odde (“a point”, “odd”, “peculiar”); related to Old English ord (“a point”). a doublet of ord "point".
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA