Þā æt nēxtan forlēt Pharao Israhela folc of his earde siðian mid miċċlum ǣhtum, and God ġesette ðone foresǣdan Moysen his folce tō heretogan, and his broðer Aaron tō sacerde; and hī lǣddon þæt folce tō ðǣre Rēadan sǣ mid miċelre fyrdinge, þæt wǣron six hundþūsenda wīgendra manna, buton wīfum and ċildum.
Then at last Pharaoh allowed the people of Israel to leave his land with much livestock, and God appointed the aforementioned Moses as the leader of his people, and his brother Aaron as priest; and they led the people to the Red Sea with a great host, which numbered six hundredthousand warriors, not counting women and children.
Where a modern English speaker would say “x hundred andy thousand,” the Anglo-Saxons said “x hundredthousand andy thousand”. For example, 186,000 washund þūsenda and six and hundeahtatiġ þūsenda, literally “a hundred thousand and eighty-six thousand.”
Theordinal form ofþūsend is unknown, as no word for “thousandth” is attested untilEarly Modern English. The only likely possibility is*þūsendoþa [ˈθuːzendoθɑ], which would match modern Englishthousandth, as well as all lower ordinal numbers ending in “twentieth” or higher, which also use the suffix-oþa.
The gender and declension ofþūsend vary widely. The word is often a feminine ō-stem (the inherited declension, since the jō-stems merged with the ō-stems, mostly by regular sound change), often a neuter a-stem, and often undeclined. When undeclined, it can be either feminine or neuter.
Old English had no word for million. Insteadþūsend þūsenda ("a thousand thousand") orþūsend sīðum þūsend ("a thousand times a thousand") were used.
