Hypernym of "pair/dyad", "tetrad", "pentad"


Does the English language have a hypernym for words like "pair", "triad", "tetrad", and "pentad"? I'm not sure where to look.



Answer



I believe these are all examples of cardinal quantifiers



cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. [Wikipedia]


Quantifier: (n) an expression that indicates the scope of a term to which it is attached. [OED]



So, given a pair, triad, tetrad, etc., each is defined by its cardinal attributes (2, 3, 4, n) along with an identifiable and consistent expression regarding the property of each number.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?