Three

How to spell three

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce three

What does three mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to one more than two, written as the digit 3.

Three in a sentence

• The meeting was rescheduled for three o'clock this afternoon.

• She packed three shirts and two pairs of shoes for the trip.

Where does three come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Three comes straight from the Old English word 'thrie' (and the feminine and neuter form 'threo'), the native Anglo-Saxon name for the number after two. It belongs to a very ancient family of words: the same root surfaces in Dutch 'drie', German 'drei', Latin 'tres', Greek 'treis' and Sanskrit 'tri', all tracing back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'three'. Because the word is so old and so heavily used, it has stayed remarkably stable in form for over a thousand years. The spelling preserves the 'th' digraph that English uses for the soft breathy sound at the start, and the silent-looking 'ee' simply spells the long vowel; the Latin cousin 'tres' is why related borrowings such as 'trio', 'triple' and 'trinity' begin with 'tri' rather than 'thr'.

How the word is built

• three (a single, unanalysable native numeral; no prefix or suffix)