quattuordecimal

English

Etymology

From Latin quattuordecim +‎ -al.

Adjective

quattuordecimal (not comparable)

1. (rare) Based upon the number fourteen.
   • 1932 October 26, “Saturday Competition: New Words”, in The Manchester Guardian, number 26,875, page 18, columns 5–6:

     But perhaps the most surprising “most-needed additions” of this kind are “teddera, peddera, pimp, and yan-a-dick,” which are said to be numerals used for counting sheep. It is not quite clear what numbers these additions displace or whether the shepherd has really adopted a “quattuor-decimal” system.

   • 1952, Stephen Cole Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics, New York, N.Y., Toronto, Ont.: D[avid] van Nostrand Company, Inc., page 6:

     Reinterpret these symbols as the digits (!) in a quattuordecimal number system, i.e. a number system based on 14 in the same way that the decimal system is based on 10.

   • 1955 February, Theodore R[ose] Cogswell, “Test Area”, in Fantastic Universe, volume 3, number 1, page 53:

     “If my memory serves me, one of your predecessors used the same terminology several millennia ago when he wanted to check some equations he had developed dealing with sub-nuclear fission. When he went back over his calculations to see if he could find out what had gone wrong, he found he’d dropped a quattuordecimal point. But by then it was too late. One of our planets was missing.”

   • 2017 March 3, Trevor Fraser, “Movie Musings: More than another teen movie, an Oscar record holder and more”, in Orlando Sentinel‎^[1]:

     Talk about a bumpy night, “La La Land” is now the only movie to be nominated for 14 Oscars and not win Best Picture. (Don’t ask me why I’m smiling.) But it does have something over the first film to receive decatessariple (quattuordecimal?) nominations, “All About Eve.”

   • 2021 September, Ariella Siu-Yin Mak-Neiman, Haydn Revisited: Compositional Atavism in the Keyboard Sonatas and Trios‎^[2], supporting document submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Musical Arts in Music, University of California, Santa Barbara:

     […] 5-8 introduces a hint of melismatic complexity, inserting into its duple meter a series of triplets and a melismatic quattuordecimal (14-note) figure.