Thousand

How to spell thousand

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thousand

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thousand mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to ten hundred, written 1,000.

Thousand in a sentence

• The charity raised over a thousand pounds at the weekend fair.

• More than a thousand people applied for the single vacancy.

Where does thousand come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Thousand comes straight from the native Germanic stock of English, appearing in Old English as thūsend with essentially the same meaning it has today. Scholars reconstruct it from a Proto-Germanic form thūsundī, which is shared across the family in words like Dutch duizend and German tausend. The deeper sense is usually explained as a 'swollen' or 'great' hundred, that is, a mighty multiplied hundred, built on roots that suggest swelling or strength joined to the older word for hundred. Because it is so old and so common, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable, but the silent 'a' in the second syllable (thous-AND, pronounced more like thous-und) is the small trap that occasionally trips writers. It is one of the oldest counting words in the language and has been written in broadly the modern shape since the earliest English texts.

How the word is built

• thous- (from Old English thūsend)
• -and (collective/numeral ending)