Seven

How to spell seven

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seven

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seven mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to one more than six.

Seven in a sentence

• The meeting starts at seven in the morning.

• There are seven days in a week.

Where does seven come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Seven comes from the Old English seofon, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the cardinal number that follows six. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic sebun, which also gave German sieben and Dutch zeven, and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root septm, the same ancestor that produced Latin septem and Greek hepta. That deep shared root is why the more formal English borrowings 'September' (once the seventh month of the Roman calendar) and 'heptagon' look so different from the homely native word. The everyday spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, smoothing only the older 'seofon' into the modern two-syllable seven. Because it is one of the first numbers an English speaker ever writes, the spelling rarely causes any trouble.

How the word is built

• sev- (from Old English seofon: the cardinal number)
• -en (numeral ending)