Welcome to 2018! 

Well, I say 2018, but as with most of my posts over this festive period, I’m writing this in advance. It is in fact 29 December, so I’m writing this to you from last year! Mind-blowing stuff altogether. If you’d like to know how to pronounce this year, I suggest you have a look at last year’s counterpart post, where I covered the twenty seventeen/two thousand and seventeen question.

I don’t want to get into anything complicated today (I’m sure most of you are too tired and headsore for that anyway), so I’m going to take a quick look at the numbers 20 and 18 (a slight clue there as to how I pronounce this year).

You might not be surprised to learn that the -teen part of the numbers between 13 and 19 is related to the number ten. It is of course an inflected form of ten, meaning ten more than, which has been around in some form or other since the days of Proto-Germanic.

The origin of twenty is also not hugely surprising. It comes from the Old English twentig, formed by combining twegen (two), and -tig (group of ten), so it simply means two groups of ten.

And I think that’s enough for today! I hope this is the start of a great year for you, and I hope you stick around for more of my thoughts!