How to spell twenty-one

hear it/'twɛnti_'wən/adjectivePrefixes and work

What it means: being one more than twenty

In a sentence: There are twenty-one colorful balloons at the party.

Same family: one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twentieth, twenty-first. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: The word “twenty” comes from Old English “twēntig,” meaning “two tens,” and English keeps that structure in numbers like “twenty-one,” literally “two tens and one.” The hyphen in “twenty-one” helps show that it is a single compound number, not two separate numbers.

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Words like this

eighty-seven · rewrite · forty-three

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