Six

How to spell six

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce six

What does six mean?

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

Six in a sentence

• The meeting was scheduled for six in the evening.

• She packed six shirts for the business trip.

Where does six come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word six comes from the Old English siex or six, the native Germanic word for the number after five. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic sehs, and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European root sweks, the ancestral term for the same quantity. That deep root also gave Latin sex and Greek hex, which is why English borrows scientific prefixes like 'hexagon' from Greek and 'sextet' from Latin even though the everyday word stays Germanic. Six has been spelled in much the way we see it for well over a thousand years, and its short, regular form has barely changed. The spelling holds no real trap: it sounds exactly as it looks.

How the word is built

• six (a single root word; from Old English siex, an unanalysable number word)