Other forms: tens
Ten is the number of fingers on both hands: 10. Ten minutes, a ten-pound note, counting to ten before you say anything you cannot take back.
The whole way we count is built on it, which is where tens, tenth and ten times come from. Before a noun it hyphenates and the noun goes singular: a ten-minute walk, a ten-year-old, a ten-pound fine. Standing alone as a noun, a ten is a banknote, a playing card or a top mark — a perfect ten. Some phrases are worth learning whole: count to ten means calm yourself before you speak, ten to one means it is very likely, nine times out of ten means nearly always, and the top ten is a chart.
1nountenThe number 10.~98%
“There were ten of us round a table meant for six.”
2nounbanknoteA banknote, playing card or score worth ten.~2%
“He put a ten on the counter and waited for his change.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ten is a number.
Ten runs back in a straight line with almost no wear: Middle English ten, Old English tien, Proto-Germanic *tehun, Proto-Indo-European *dekm. Words that everybody uses every day change the least, and this one has held its shape for thousands of years. The teen in thirteen and nineteen comes from the same root.
Proto-Indo-European
*déḱm̥
Proto-Germanic
*tehun
Proto-West Germanic
*tehun
Old English
tīen
Middle English
ten
English, today
ten
From Middle English ten, tene, from Old English tīen, from Proto-West Germanic tehun, from Proto-Germanic tehun, from Proto-Indo-European déḱm̥. Cognate with Scots ten, tene (“ten”), West Frisian tsien (“ten”), stq tjoon (“ten”), frr tiin (“ten”). See also teen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA