Eli5: why are 11 and 12 called eleven ant twelve and not oneteen and twoteen?

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Those terms come from the Old English words endleofan and twelf. This comes from an earlier construction of ainlif and twalif where they are referring to a remainder, like saying “ten and one” or “ten and two”.

Why stop at just eleven and twelve? This is probably due to counting up to a dozen being all that the typical person would be required to do, and so terms used commonly would stop there. Contributing to this may be that a way of counting on one’s fingers was to use the thumb to point at each joint of the fingers of one hand. Each of the four fingers has three joints, adding up to twelve.

Twelve also has more factors than ten which could explain it being commonly used. Ten has only 1, 2, 5, and 10 as factors, while twelve has 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. If you want to easily divide something evenly then starting from twelve is more convenient than ten.

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