The podictionary word for today is twelve:  On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.  Of course you know that on the twelfth day of Christmas I got twelve drummers drumming.  But which day was that anyway?  The idea is that it took the wise men 12 days to find their way to the Christ child so that December 26th is the first day of Christmas while the 12th day is January 6th. 

Twelve as a word has been with us for a very long time.  It appears first with a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary circa the year 888.  So that makes it solidly Old English.  It looks to me that it hasn’t changed its pronunciation all that much over all those years either since the earliest spellings are T W E L F.  It also seems to have been attributed some special meaning, although I don’t for the life of me know why.  There are twelve months in a year, twelve hours on the clock, there were twelve apostles and twelve tribes of Israel and twelve Labors of Hercules.  Before the word twelve came into English it was definitely a Germanic word and it seems that it can be broken into two parts twa meaning “two,” and the second half of the word stemming from an Old Teutonic root lithan.  This is said to have the same parentage as our word leave, as in “get out of here.” So that the literal meaning of the word twelve is “two left over” and the reference is clearly that twelve is two more than ten. 

Have you ever wondered why the teens start with thirteen so that although an eleven or twelve year old is well into their second decade, but not yet into their teens.  It’s because in English and these other Germanic tongues those first two numbers beyond ten refer to an implied ten, not an explicit ten.  This is true evidently of Lithuanian as well, although all other Indo-European languages are said to do as we do with our teen numbers, refer to ten explicitly. 

That’s why thirteen is called thirteen.  It literally means “three plus ten.”  Eleven comes from ainlif also in Old Teutonic and as such is similar to twelve in that the first part of its word roots is ain, meaning “one” and again like twelve, the second part lif means “left over.”