An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/Hundert

by Friedrich Kluge

Hundert, neuter, ‘hundred,’ from the equivalent Middle High German and late Old High German hundert, neuter; compare Old Saxon hunderod, Anglo-Saxon and English hundred, and the equivalent Old Icelandic hundrað, neuter; Gothic *hundaraþ (genitive -dis) is wanting; the word is evidently a compound, the second part of which is connected with Gothic raþjan, ‘to count’ (compare Rede). The first component was used alone for ‘hundred’; compare Gothic twa hunda, 200, þrija hunda, 300, &c.; Old High German zwei hunt, driu hunt, &c., Anglo-Saxon tâ hund, þreo hund, 200, 300. This simple term is an Aryan form, Teutonic hunda-, from pre-Teutonic kmtó-; compare Latin centum, Greek ἑκατόν, Sanscrit çatám, Zend sata, Lithuanian szimtas (m is changed in Teutonic into n before d; see Rand); Old Slovenian sŭto is probably derived from Iran. sata. But while the word, judging from the correspondences in these language, denoted our decimal ‘hundred’ in primitively Aryan, we find that it is used in Old Teutonic for 120, the so-called duodecimal hundred. In Old Icelandic hundraþ in the pre-Christian period denoted only 120, a distinction being made at a later period between tólfrœtt hundraþ, 120, and tírœtt hundraþ, 100; even at the present time hundraþ denotes the duodecimal hundred in Iceland. In Gothic we have only indirect evidence of the combination of the decimal and duodecimal numeration, taíhuntê-hund, ‘ten times ten,’ but twa hunda, 200 (Old Icelandic tíu-tiger, ‘ten tens, 100’). So too in Old High German and Anglo-Saxon; compare Old High German zëhanzo, ‘100,’ properly ‘ten tens,’ and also einhunt, Anglo-Saxon teóntig, but tû hund. In other cases also the co-existence of the duodecimal and decimal system may be seen in Old Teutonic. In German the word for 120 became obsolete at an early period, but its existence may be inferred from the fact that the old word hund in Old High German and Middle High German was used only for several hundreds, while hundred was expressed almost entirely by zëhanzo and zëhenzig.