thousand

English

Alternative forms

  • Arabic numerals: 1000 (see for numerical forms in other scripts)
  • Roman numerals: M
  • ISO prefix: kilo-
  • Exponential notation: 103

Etymology

From Middle English thousend, thusand, from Old English þūsend (“thousand”), from Proto-Germanic *þūsundī (“thousand”), (compare Scots thousand (“thousand”), Saterland Frisian duusend (“thousand”), West Frisian tûzen (“thousand”), Dutch duizend (“thousand”), German tausend (“thousand”), Danish tusind (“thousand”), Swedish tusen (“thousand”), Icelandic þúsund (“thousand”), Faroese túsund (“thousand”), from Proto-Indo-European *tuHsont-, *tuHsenti- (compare Lithuanian tūkstantis (“thousand”), Russian ты́сяча (týsjača)).

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ˈθaʊz(ə)nd/
  • (US) enPR: thou′zənd, IPA(key): /ˈθaʊz(ə)nd/, [ˈθaʊ̯z(ɪ̈)nd]
  • Audio (US)(file)
  • Hyphenation: thou‧sand

Numeral

thousand (plural thousands)

  1. (cardinal) A numerical value equal to 1,000 = 10 × 100 = 103
    The company earned fifty thousand dollars last month.
    Many thousands of people came to the conference.

Usage notes

Unlike cardinal numerals up to ninety-nine, the word thousand is a noun like dozen and needs a determiner to function as a numeral.

  • a thousand men / one thousand men / the thousand men
  • compare a dozen men / one dozen men / the dozen men
  • compare ten men / the ten men

Thousand can be used also in plurals. It doesn't take -s when preceded by a determiner.

  • two thousand men / some thousand men
  • thousands of men / hundreds of thousands of men

Synonyms

Derived terms

See also

  • Appendix:Words used as placeholders to count seconds

Translations

Anagrams

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