Twenty

How to spell twenty

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce twenty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does twenty mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to two times ten; 20.

Twenty in a sentence

• The recipe needs twenty minutes in the oven.

• She paid the fare with a twenty pound note.

Where does twenty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English twentig, which combined twegen, meaning 'two', with the suffix -tig, denoting a group of ten; the literal sense was therefore 'two tens'. That same -tig element survives across the higher English numerals such as thirty, forty, and fifty, all of them tagging on a count of tens. The form has Germanic relatives throughout the family, including the Dutch twintig and the German zwanzig, which preserve the same 'two-ten' construction. Over the centuries the spelling settled with that quiet 'w' that the modern pronunciation often softens, and the colloquial 'twenny' sound is exactly why some writers momentarily doubt whether the 'w' and 't' belong where they do. The word has been a fixed part of everyday English counting since the earliest written records.

How the word is built

• twen- (from twegen: two)
• -ty (from Old English -tig: group of ten)