Other forms: sevens
Seven is the number after six and before eight — the days in a week, the colours people name in a rainbow, the notes in a scale before the octave repeats.
It is one of the earliest words a learner meets and one of the hardest to say cleanly: two syllables, SEV-uhn, and the v is voiced. Watch the family — seventh is the ordinal and drops nothing, seventy is the ten, seventeen is the teen, and the stress moves between seventeen and seventy in a way that matters when saying a price aloud. Seven has more superstition attached to it than any other small number in English, which is why lucky seven and seventh heaven exist and lucky six does not.
1nounsevenThe number 7.~98%
“There are seven days in a week.”
2nounoclockSeven o'clock.~2%
“The train leaves at seven.”
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.
seven is a number.
Old English seofon goes back through Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European *septm, and the same ancestor gives Latin septem, Greek hepta and Sanskrit sapta. It is one of the oldest recoverable words in the language: the number seven has been called something very like this for five thousand years.
Proto-Indo-European
*septḿ̥ — seven
Proto-Germanic
*sebun — seven
Proto-West Germanic
*sebun — seven
Old English
seofon — seven
Middle English
seven
English, today
seven
From Middle English seven, from Old English seofon (“seven”), from Proto-West Germanic sebun (“seven”), from Proto-Germanic sebun (“seven”), from Proto-Indo-European septḿ̥ (“seven”). Cognate with Scots seiven (“seven”), West Frisian sân (“seven”), stq soogen (“seven”), Low German söven (“seven”), Dutch zeven (“seven”), German sieben (“seven”), Danish syv (“seven”), Norwegian sju (“seven”), Icelandic sjö (“seven”), Latin septem (“seven”), Ancient Greek ἑπτά (“seven”), Russian семь, Sanskrit सप्त.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA