twelve

UK/twɛlv/US/twɛlv/

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

Twelve is ten plus two. A dozen, and one of the most useful numbers there is.

It divides by two, three, four and six, which is why so much of the old world was counted in twelves: twelve inches to a foot, twelve pence to a shilling, twelve months, twelve hours on a clock face. That divisibility is the reason the dozen survived so long against the decimal ten. Twelve of anything is a dozen and twelve dozen is a gross. Midday and midnight are both twelve o'clock.

Definitions of twelve

1nountwelveThe number after eleven; a dozen.A1
“There were twelve of us round the table.”

Also accepted in games: dozen

Where it comes from

Twelve is two left over. Old English twelf joins two to a piece meaning left over, that is, two remaining once you have counted to ten, and eleven is the same compound made with one.

Proto-Indo-European
*leyp- — leave, remain
Proto-Germanic
*twalif
Old English
twelf — twelve
Middle English
twelve
English, today
twelve

Built from

*twai · Proto-Germanic — two
*-lif · Proto-Germanic — left over

From Middle English twelve, from Old English twelf (“twelve”), from Proto-Germanic twalif, an old compound of twai (“two”) and -lif (“left over”) (i.e., two left over after having already counted to ten), from Proto-Indo-European leyp- (“leave, remain”). Cognate with stq tweelf, tweelif, tweelich (“twelve”), West Frisian tolve (“twelve”), Dutch twaalf (“twelve”), German Low German twalf, twalv (“twelve”), German zwölf (“twelve”), Danish -, Swedish - and Norwegian tolv (“twelve”), Icelandic tólf (“twelve”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Colors, Shapes & Numbers, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 26 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

twelve in the wild

The twelve-bar blues (or blues changes) is one of the most prominent chord progressions in popular music.
Twelve-bar blues
Developed in the 1930s, the first twelve-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), founded by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, aided its membership to overcome alcoholism.
Twelve-step program
The technique was first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law of the twelve tones" in 1919.
Twelve-tone technique
Schoenberg himself described the system as a "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another".
Twelve-tone technique
A twelve-string guitar is a steel-string guitar with 12 strings in six courses, which produces a thicker, more ringing tone than a standard six-string guitar.
Twelve-string guitar

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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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