555: five Jun, 15, 2016

This is the 555th Word Facts Post. The word 'five' is from the Old English 'fīf,', and still today closely resembles the words for 5 in various Germanic languages, such as the Dutch 'vijf' and German 'fünf'. Less obvious perhaps is the connection to the Latin 'quinque' and Greek 'pente'. According to Grimm's law (see the post from yesterday) during the first Germanic sound shift, p-sounds became f-sounds (one of many changes), so the relation between the Greek and Germanic is far closer than would appear at first glance.