Other forms: sixes
Six is the number after five and before seven, written 6. Six eggs in half a box, the six dots on a die, the six o'clock news.
Half a dozen is six. The ordinal is sixth — the sixth of June, sixth place — and the x stays through sixteen, sixty and sixth. Listen hard for sixteen against sixty, because the stress is the only reliable difference: sixTEEN pushes to the end, SIXty sits at the front. A few old phrases keep the number alive: at sixes and sevens means in a muddle, and six of one and half a dozen of the other means the two choices come to the same thing. In cricket a six is a hit that clears the boundary, which is where knocked me for six comes from.
1nounsixThe number 6, one more than five.~2%
“The clock struck six.”
2adjectiveamountingAmounting to six in number.~94%
“Six people were waiting at the bus stop.”
3nouncricket(Cricket) a hit that sends the ball over the boundary without bouncing, scoring six runs.~4%
“He hit the last ball of the over for six.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 25 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
six is a number.
Six has barely moved in five thousand years. Old English six came from Proto-Germanic sehs and before that the Proto-Indo-European sweks. You can hear the family right across the map: German sechs, Dutch zes, Danish seks, Latin sex, Ancient Greek hex, Sanskrit shash.
Proto-Indo-European
*swéḱs
Proto-Germanic
*sehs
Proto-West Germanic
*sehs
Old English
six
Middle English
six
English, today
six
From Middle English six, from Old English six, from Proto-West Germanic sehs, from Proto-Germanic sehs, from Proto-Indo-European swéḱs. Compare West Frisian seis, Dutch zes, Low German söss, sess, German sechs, Norwegian - and Danish seks, also Latin sex, Ancient Greek ἕξ, Sanskrit षष्. a doublet of sice. Toilet sense predates military usage.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA