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sixteen

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

Sixteen is the number after fifteen. Four squared, and two to the power of four.

In Britain it is the age of a great many thresholds at once, since school-leaving, marrying with consent and the age of consent all fall there, which makes it one of the most legally significant birthdays. Computing likes it because it is a power of two, which is why colours, memory sizes and hexadecimal all work in sixteens. Sweet sixteen is the American celebration.

Definitions of sixteen

  1. 1nounsixteenThe number after fifteen.A1

    “He left school at sixteen and never went back.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Germanic

    *sehstehun

  2. Old English

    sixtīene

  3. Middle English

    sextene

  4. English, today

    sixteen

Middle English sextene, sixtene, from Old English sixtīene, from Proto-Germanic sehstehun. Cognate with West Frisian sechstjin, Dutch zestien, German sechzehn, Danish seksten. Equivalent to six + -teen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

sixteen in the wild

  • The games were organised by a group of sixteen women, who were also responsible for weaving a peplos for Hera and arranging choral dances.

    Heraean Games

  • One of them, from sixteen to twenty feet long, with a brown and rough body, opened its enormous jaws and showed us its frightful teeth.

    Adventures of a Young Naturalist· Lucien Biart

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.