Sexagint

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A group, set, or unit made up of sixty items, especially in a system of counting by sixties
2. A collection of exactly sixty things, or a unit of sixty used in a counting system
3. A set containing sixty members, as in a sexagesimal way of reckoning

Etymology: "Sexagint" is a term for a group of sixty, formed in English from the Latin numeral "sexaginta" (sixty), itself built from "sex" (six) and the suffix "-ginta," a tens-ending related to "viginti" (twenty) and "centum" (hundred). Its name-sake relative is the word "septuagint," which many people know as the title of the Greek Old Testament translation, and "sexagint" follows the same pattern of Latin number-forms ending in "-agint" for sixty-based sets. The word is a learned coinage rather than an everyday borrowing. English adopted it from Latin-style number formations used in scholarly and mathematical writing, where terms for groups by tens were made to name collections of a given size. Because it was built deliberately from classical numerals, it does not appear in ordinary speech and is mostly found in dictionaries and specialist contexts.