Language Matters | How we got the word ‘hundred’, a significant number in many cultures
- Our linguistics expert marks her 100th column with a look at how the English language achieved its perfect score
- From temperature to cricket, the lovely round number is often associated with superlatives or successes
One hundred. The mark we’d like on our report cards. The number of runs a batsman wants in a single innings. The number of days in office considered a benchmark to measure the early success of a president (“first 100 days” was coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose extraordinary productivity set a standard for future United States presidents).
The significance this number has (in some cultures) is primarily because our notational system for numbers is decimal. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. The Western calendar has decades and millennia, and we speak of specific centuries to establish broad, meaningful historical periods. One hundred; 100. A round number, hinting at perfection.
In Old English, hund- was a hundred while the -red came from an old Germanic root meaning “reckoning” – hundred thus entailed “a count of hundred”. But not always: hundred was also a long hundred or a great hundred, meaning six score, i.e. 120.
This meaning, found in Old Norse, Old English and Middle Scottish, was used when counting, and continued in certain northern English dialects from the 15th century to the 19th century, in the sale of various commodities. One explanation suggests the vestiges of a duodecimal, i.e. base 12, system in medieval Germanic (though scholars debate the details).
In modern English, many terms relating to a hundred come from the Latin centum (incidentally C in Roman numerals), such as century, centimetre, etc. The Modern Latin per centum “by the hundred” gave us per cent.