Cardinal words
I started thinking about the class of English nouns with definitions of the form “set of n members”, where n is a cardinal number. The list below represents the words that occurred to me with a few minutes’ thinking, with the requirement that the word must be in general circulation (defined for these purposes as “appearing at least 10,000 times in the Google index.”) Please send me omissions and I will update this list.
| word | n |
| item | 1 |
| unit | 1 |
| couple | 2 |
| pair | 2 |
| twosome | 2 |
| threesome | 3 |
| trio | 3 |
| foursome | 4 |
| quartet | 4 |
| quintet | 5 |
| half-dozen | 6 |
| sextet | 6 |
| septet | 7 |
| octet | 8 |
| dozen | 12 |
| baker’s dozen | 13 |
| score | 20 |
| gross | 144 |
| mole | 6.022 x 1023 |
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