Czech by Numbers - Eight

Hello and welcome to Radio Prague's Czech learning series Czech by Numbers in which we explore numbers in the Czech language and their use in everyday speech. Today we are back with lesson number eight - lekce číslo osm.

As you have just heard the Czech word for eight - osm sounds nothing like the English. However, it is very similar to its equivalents in other Slavonic languages.

The figure of eight is osmička and the word is used in the same way as in English, for example in figure-skating. In a different sport, osma or osmiveslice is an eight-oar, an eight.

But back to osmička, a figure of eight. The word is also used to describe a wisdom tooth, because it is the eighth tooth from the middle.

The ordinal number eighth is osmý for the masculine, osmá for the feminine and osmé for the neuter gender. The expression osmý div světa - the eighth wonder of the world describes something extraordinary and novel.

An eighth, as in an eighth part of a whole, is osmina. In music, osmina means an eighth note, or a quaver, a note played for one eighth the duration of a whole note.

The word osminka is the diminutive form of osmina but means the same. If you ask in a shop for osminka másla - literally an "eighth of butter" you will get a 125-gram cube of butter, an eighth of a kilogram.

And that's it for our lesson number eight, osmá lekce. We'll be back next week with all you need to know about the number nine in Czech. Till then na shledanou, bye-bye.