Product Code Database
Numeral or number prefixes are derived from numerals or occasionally other . In English and many other languages, they are used to coin numerous series of words. For example:
In many European languages there are two principal systems, taken from Latin and Greek language, each with several subsystems; in addition, Sanskrit occupies a marginal position. There is also an international set of , which are used in the world's metric system.
Words in the cardinal category are cardinal numbers, such as the English one, two, three, which name the count of items in a sequence. The multiple category are numbers, like the English once, twice, thrice, that specify the number of events or instances of otherwise identical or similar items. Enumeration with the distributive category originally was meant to specify one each, two each or one by one, two by two, etc., giving how many items of each type are desired or had been found, although distinct word forms for that meaning are now mostly lost. The ordinal category are based on ordinal numbers such as the English first, second, third, which specify position of items in a sequence. In Latin and Greek, the ordinal forms are also used for fractions for amounts higher than 2; only the fraction has special forms.
The same suffix may be used with more than one category of number, as for example the ordinal numbers secondary and tertiary and the distributive numbers binary and ternary.
For the hundreds, there are competing forms: Those in -gent-, from the original Latin, and those in -cent-, derived from centi-, etc. plus the prefixes for 1 through 9 .
Many of the items in the following tables are not in general use, but may rather be regarded as coinages by individuals. In scientific contexts, either scientific notation or are used to express very large or very small numbers, and not unwieldy prefixes.
| + Number prefixes in English !rowspan=2 | Number !colspan=4 | Latin derived !colspan=3 | Greek derived ! rowspan="2" | Sanskrit | ||
| 0 | shūnya- | |||||
| 1 | eka- | |||||
| 2 | dvi- | |||||
| 3 | trit- (" third") tritaio- (" every third day") | tri- | ||||
| 4 | catur- | |||||
| 5 | pañca- | |||||
| 6 | ṣaṭ- | |||||
| 7 | sapta- | |||||
| 8 | aṣṭa- | |||||
| 9 | nava- | |||||
| 10 | dasha- | |||||
| 11 | ekadasha- | |||||
| 12 | dvadasha- | |||||
| 13 | trayodasha- | |||||
| 14 | chaturdasha- | |||||
| 15 | panchadasha- | |||||
| 16 | sedec-, sexdec- ( but hybrid word hexadecimal) | shodasha- | ||||
| 17 | saptadasha- | |||||
| 18 | ashtadasha- | |||||
| 19 | navadasha- | |||||
| 20 | vimshati- | |||||
| 22 | ||||||
| 24 | chaturvimshati- | |||||
| 25 | ||||||
| 30 | trimshat- | |||||
| 31 | ||||||
| 40 | chatvarimshat- | |||||
| 50 | panchashat- | |||||
| 60 | shasti- | |||||
| 70 | saptati- | |||||
| 80 | ashiti- | |||||
| 90 | navati- | |||||
| 100 | shata– | |||||
| 120 | ||||||
| 150 | ||||||
| 200 | ||||||
| 250 | ||||||
| 300 | ||||||
| 400 | ||||||
| 500 | ||||||
| 600 | ||||||
| 700 | ||||||
| 800 | ||||||
| 900 | ||||||
| sahasra– | ||||||
| ayuta– | ||||||
or | laksha– | |||||
| infini- | apeiro- | |||||
| Few | ||||||
| Many (more than 1) | bahut– | |||||
Because of the common inheritance of Greek and Latin roots across the , the import of much of that derived vocabulary into non-Romance languages (such as into English language via Norman language), and the loanwords of 19th and 20th century coinages into many languages, the same numerical prefixes occur in many languages.
Numerical prefixes are not restricted to denoting integers. Some of the SI prefixes denote negative powers of 10, i.e. division by a multiple of 10 rather than multiplication by it. Several common-use numerical prefixes denote .
Words containing non-technical numerical prefixes are usually not hyphenated. This is not an absolute rule, however, and there are exceptions (for example: occurs in addition to ). There are no exceptions for words comprising technical numerical prefixes, though. and words comprising and binary prefixes are not hyphenated, by definition.
Nonetheless, for clarity, dictionaries list numerical prefixes in hyphenated form, to distinguish the prefixes from words with the same spellings (such as and ).
Several technical numerical prefixes are not derived from words for numbers. ( is not derived from a number word, for example.) Similarly, some are only derived from words for numbers inasmuch as they are word play. ( is word play on , for example. See its etymology for details.) The peta, exa, zetta, yotta, ronna, and quetta are based on the Ancient Greek or Ancient Latin numbers from 5 to 10, referring to the fifth through tenth powers of . The initial letter h has been removed from some of these stems and the initial letters z, y, r, and q have been added, ascending in reverse alphabetical order, to avoid confusion with other metric prefixes.
The root language of a numerical prefix need not be related to the root language of the word that it prefixes. Some words comprising numerical prefixes are .
In certain classes of systematic names, there are a few other exceptions to the rule of using Greek-derived numerical prefixes. The IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry, for example, uses the numerical prefixes derived from Greek, except for the prefix for 9 (as mentioned) and the prefixes from 1 to 4 (meth-, eth-, prop-, and but-), which are not derived from words for numbers. These prefixes were invented by the IUPAC, deriving them from the pre-existing names for several compounds that it was intended to preserve in the new system: (via , which is in turn from the Greek word for wine), (from coined by Justus von Liebig in 1834), (from , which is in turn from and the Greek word for fat), and (from , which is in turn from , which is in turn from the Latin word for butter).
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