ten

name

1. Abbreviation of Tennessee.

noun

Etymology: PIE word *déḱm̥ From Middle English ten, tene, from Old English tīen, from Proto-West Germanic *tehun, from Proto-Germanic *tehun, from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥. Cognate with Scots ten, tene (“ten”), West Frisian tsien (“ten”), Saterland Frisian tjoon (“ten”), North Frisian tiin (“ten”). See also teen.

1. A set or group with ten elements.

   “We divided the chocolates into tens to hand out to Hallowe'en visitors.”

   “They can readily state the number of tens in a hundred. But somehow they do not have a full appreciation of the "tenness" of our system and how the system is structured.”

2. An inexact quantity, typically understood to be between 20 and 100.

   “Our houses are tens of meters apart, so we don't have to worry about noise from our neighbours.”

   “tens of thousands of voters”

3. A card in a given suit with a value of ten.
4. A denomination of currency, such as a banknote, with a value of ten units.

   “Can you give me two tens for this twenty?”

5. A perfect specimen, (particularly) a physically attractive person.

   “I was in the Woodley Park–Zoo in D.C. and mom and sister were waiting to see the pandas, so me and my pops broke away to check out the monkey house. Well, there was a beautiful teacher, I mean we're talking a ten, she was blond, had a low-cut dress on, just gorgeous. And she has about eight or nine students and she's pointing out all the different monkeys. And me and my dad noticed this huge orangutan kind of fiddling with himself. And on close [censored] And we kept checking it out and he was looking directly at the teacher. Well, a couple minutes passed by [censored] he proceeds to [censored] that's when the teacher noticed and, you know, took the kids away very hurriedly. But I looked at my dad and said, you know, they're so much like us.”

   “An Office Ten is a person who falls somewhere between average to mildly good-looking in the world at large but skyrockets to wildly attractive within the confines of an open-concept desk plan.”

6. A high level of intensity.

   “"Intensities in 10 Cities"”

   “... Marty Di Bergi (Rob Reiner): "Why don't you just make ten louder, and make ten be the top number?" Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest): "These go to eleven."”

7. The act of rowing ten strokes flat out.

   “At the 1,000-metres post we gave a ten, which raised our lead to 1⅔ lengths; the Belgians were rowing hard, but one felt that they still had plenty of spurting power.”

   “Morris gave a ten, and an unbelievable surge ran through the boat, one that I had never felt before.”

num

Etymology: PIE word *déḱm̥ From Middle English ten, tene, from Old English tīen, from Proto-West Germanic *tehun, from Proto-Germanic *tehun, from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥. Cognate with Scots ten, tene (“ten”), West Frisian tsien (“ten”), Saterland Frisian tjoon (“ten”), North Frisian tiin (“ten”). See also teen.

1. The number occurring after nine and before eleven, represented in Arabic numerals (base ten) as 10 and in Roman numerals as X.

   “There is a melody upon the Earth as though ten thousand streams all sang together for their homes that they had forsaken in the hills.”

   “A ten frame is a simple graphic tool that allows people to “see” numbers.”