 Welcome to the Endless Knot. We've just reached 1,000 subscribers. Thank you. Thanks for watching, subscribing, sharing, and commenting. Your interest and support is what makes this all so much fun and so worthwhile. So, there seems to be no better way to mark this milestone than to talk about the etymology of thousand. Thousand is actually a compound word, the AND part being the same as the HUND part of hundred, and going back to the same Proto-Indo-European root that produced Latin kentum also meaning hundred, as in centimeter, a hundredth of a meter. The red part of hundred, by the way, means number or reckoning, so hundred literally means the number hundred. But the HUND part itself has two components. The first part means ten, and gives us both the word ten, and words such as decade and decimal, and then it has a suffix on the end which raises it from ten to hundred. This ten root, by the way, gives us the teen part of thirteen, fourteen, and so forth, also the T part of twenty, thirty, and so forth, meaning literally two tens and three tens. But getting back to thousand, the first part of that word comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to swell, so literally thousand means swollen hundred. It probably originally didn't refer to a precise number, meaning something more like a great many, but eventually came to mean ten hundreds. That swelling root, by the way, also gives us words such as thumb, thigh, tumor, and the second element of butter. The first part of butter comes from Greek bus, which means and is related to the word cow, about which you can learn more in our video, beef. The second part of butter comes from Greek churros, meaning cheese, so literally cow cheese, coming from that swelling root in Proto-Indo-European, in reference to the fermentation of the cheese making process. Of course, speaking of a hundred, a hundred at least in Germanic languages, did not originally mean one hundred. It originally meant one hundred and twenty, but when Latin arrived on the scene with kentum referring to the number one hundred, the word hundred eventually changed its meaning. To avoid confusion, the two ways of counting can be distinguished, with the newer count called tentiwise, that is by tens, and the old sense of hundred called the long hundred. Many have speculated that this implies that early Germanic peoples used a base twelve system, but this is only sort of true. Another piece of evidence for this is that eleven and twelve are different from the other teens, not one teen, two teen, thirteen, but they're still reckoned from the ten. So eleven means literally one left after the initial count of ten, and twelve is similarly two left after the initial count of ten. So it's still really a base ten system. A similar kind of number inflation happened with the word million. Million comes from Latin mille, meaning thousand, but with the addition of a suffix for emphasis, it increased in size to a thousand thousands. From Latin mille, by the way, we get the prefix mille as in millimetre, a thousandth of a metre, and the word mile, which was originally a thousand paces. Millet is also related through Greek to the prefix kilo as in kilometre, a thousand metres. So a mile and a kilometre are, it turns out, etymologically related. I've mentioned the metric unit of measurement, the metre, a number of times, and that's where this linguistic reckoning brings us next. Meter, metric, and measure all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root, which also gives us moon and month, thus measures of time, and meal, a time appointed for eating, whose earlier sense of measure or quantity is still preserved in the compound word piecemeal. To round out the Imperial versus Metric discussion, a quick word about the inch, to balance my earlier mention of the centimetre. Inch comes from Latin uncia, meaning one-twelfth part, there's that idea of a possible base twelfth counting system again. Ultimately from Latin unus, meaning one, and is cognate not only with English one, but also any, lone, one really is the loneliest number, and ounce, another unit of measurement. Inch and ounce were borrowed into English from Latin uncia at different times, first in pre-old English Germanic, and then again in Middle English, and so the words underwent different sound changes over the years. One inch is a twelfth of a foot, and one ounce ought to be a twelfth of a pound, and was at one point, but now, according to the standard of Wau du Pois system, there are sixteen ounces to the pound, though the Troy system used exclusively for precious metals still has the etymologically correct twelve ounces to the pound. An inch was defined in the medieval period as the length of three barley-corns. However, the Scottish King David I in the twelfth century supposedly defined the inch as the width of an average man's thumb at the base of the nail, which brings us back to the word thumb. And so, as we measure up and reach this milestone, here's a big thumbs up to all our viewers. Thanks a million! If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below, and check out our Patreon page where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. Leave a comment or question, or tweet at alliterative. You can also read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.