Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 114, the craft of numbering.

In this episode, we're going to shift gears a little bit.

We usually look at the history of words, but this time we're going to look at the history

of numbers.

Actually, we're going to do both.

We'll explore the origin of numbers and the words we use to talk about numbers.

Number words are some of the most conservative words in most languages, including English.

Almost all of the words we use for basic numbers can be traced back to Old English.

But in the 1300s, English started to borrow new number words from other languages.

Those words came from the usual suspects, French, Latin, and Greek.

But English even picked up at least one number word from Arabic.

And that was because the Hindu Arabic numerals that we used today were starting to appear

in England for the first time.

Those new numerals gradually replaced the traditional Roman numerals which had been used since

the Anglo-Saxon period.

So this time we'll look at those developments, and we'll also explore the interaction

of language and numbers.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com

and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

Now this time we're going to turn our attention to numbers and the way we express numbers

in the English language.

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