Seofon

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. The Old English word for the number seven, used in early English before modern spelling developed
2. An archaic form of the numeral seven found in Anglo-Saxon writing and ancestral to the modern word
3. The numeral denoting one more than six, as written in the Old English language of early medieval England

Etymology: Old English "seofon" is the ancestor of modern "seven," and it belongs to one of the oldest vocabularies in the language. It descends from the Proto-Germanic numeral that also gave German "sieben" and Dutch "zeven," all reaching back to the Indo-European root for the same number. Because the number was so basic, its form changed very little across the centuries, and the sound shifts that reshaped other English words left "seven" recognisably close to its Anglo-Saxon original. The most striking change is the vowel. Old English "seofon" was pronounced with a sound close to "sayvon," and the shift that followed over the Middle English period, with the "f" becoming "v" in the middle of the word, produced the modern pronunciation. Spelling lagged behind speech, which is why the modern written form still looks more like its Old English parent than it sounds.