Fourteen

How to spell fourteen

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fourteen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fourteen mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to ten plus four, written as 14.

Fourteen in a sentence

• The recipe makes fourteen small muffins in a single batch.

• She turned fourteen the week before starting secondary school.

Where does fourteen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English, where it appeared as feowertiene, a simple compound of feower meaning 'four' and tien meaning 'ten', so it literally meant 'four-and-ten'. The -teen ending is the same element that closes thirteen through nineteen, and it is just an old form of 'ten' worn down over centuries of speech. The Germanic roots run deep: feower is cousin to German vier and Dutch vier, while tien matches German zehn and the Latin decem that gives us 'decimal'. The spelling keeps the full 'four' from its parent word, which is why the 'u' survives here even though it is silent to many ears; remembering that fourteen contains four explains the otherwise puzzling 'ou'. The form has been stable in English for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• four (the number 4)
• -teen (ten more, from Old English -tiene)