thousand

UK/ˈθaʊz(ə)nd/US/ˈθaʊz(ə)n(d)/

nounA1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: thousands

A thousand is ten times one hundred, written as a one with three zeros. A thousand people, thousands of them, one in a thousand.

Languages group large numbers differently, and English counts in thousands where Chinese and Japanese count in ten thousands, which makes translating large figures surprisingly hard. A thousand thousands is a million.

Definitions of thousand

1nounthousandTen times one hundred — written as a one with three zeros.A1
“The ticket cost a thousand pounds, far more than we had expected.”

thousand is a number.

Where it comes from

Old English thusend comes from a Germanic compound meaning something like a swollen hundred.

Middle English
thousend
English, today
thousand

From Middle English thousend. From Middle English thousend, thusand, from Old English þūsend (“thousand”), from Proto-West Germanic þūsundi, from Proto-Germanic þūsundī (“thousand”), (compare Scots thousand (“thousand”), stq duusend (“thousand”), West Frisian tûzen (“thousand”), Dutch duizend (“thousand”), German tausend (“thousand”), Danish tusind (“thousand”), Swedish tusen (“thousand”), Norwegian tusen (“thousand”), Icelandic þúsund (“thousand”), Faroese túsund (“thousand”)), from Proto-Indo-European tuHsont-, tuHsenti- (compare Lithuanian tūkstantis (“thousand”), Polish tysiąc, Russian ты́сяча, Finnish tuhat, Estonian tuhat).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in School & Learning

Practise this word

thousand in the wild

A millennium (pl. millennia or millenniums) is a period of one thousand years.
Millennium
In most English-speaking countries, it can be written with or without a comma or sometimes a period separating the thousands digit: 1,000.
1000 (number)
A group of one thousand units is sometimes known, from Ancient Greek, as a chiliad.
1000 (number)
The Indian numbering system uses the named numbers common between the long and short scales up to ten thousand.
Names of large numbers
However, this is not common anymore, and the word has been used to mean one thousand million for several decades.
1,000,000,000

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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.

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