Line drawing of mille
Coloured illustration of mille
#364 of 1,000Core 1000

Translation

thousand, a thousand

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Examples

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A thousand men were on the plain.

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Two thousand soldiers came.

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The kingdom stood for a thousand years.

milibus pugnavit.

He fought with three thousand of the enemy.

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Thousands of men came into the city.

Mille behaves as two different words depending on number, and this catches people out. In the singular it is an indeclinable adjective sitting straight in front of its noun: "mille homines", a thousand men, with homines doing whatever the sentence needs. In the plural it is a neuter noun of the third declension, milia, milium, milibus, and it takes a partitive genitive: "duo milia hominum" is literally two thousands of men.

The spelling wobbles. Classical texts have milia with one l; medieval scribes double it to millia, and this corpus shows both. A mile is mille passus, a thousand paces, which is where the English word and the Roman milestone both come from.

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Latin · Free printables

mille: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Latin word "mille" (thousand, a thousand): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

This word is taught in chapter 4, lesson 8: mille, spes, caro and 10 more words.