Octante
The old French word for 80

What octante means

Octante is the number 80. It belongs to the same regular, decimal-style family as septante (70) and nonante (90): instead of France’s vigesimal quatre-vingts (“four-twenties”), octante names 80 with a single Latin-derived word. It comes from the Latin octoginta, the ordinary Latin word for eighty, and it is a doublet of huitante, which was built on huit (8) and evolved along a slightly different path from the same root.

Where septante and nonante are still in everyday use across Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland, octante is the one member of the regularised set that has almost entirely dropped out of living speech. It is best understood as the older sibling of huitante: same meaning, same logic, but no longer the word people actually say for 80 in modern Switzerland.

How to pronounce octante

Octante is pronounced /ɔk.tɑ̃t/, roughly “ok-TONT”. The opening “oc” is the same syllable you hear in octobre; the “-ante” ending is the nasal vowel shared with soixante and quarante, and the final “e” is silent. Tap play to hear it:

Counting 80 to 89 with octante

Octante takes the regular “et un” connector in 81 (octante et un), exactly like vingt et un (21) and the Swiss huitante et un, whereas the France form quatre-vingt-un drops it. The huitante column shows the equivalent living Swiss form, and the France column shows the standard vigesimal form.

Octante vs huitante

Octante and huitante are doublets: two words for 80 that descend from the same Latin octoginta but took different routes into French. Octante stays close to the Latin shape; huitante was rebuilt on the French huit (8). Over time huitante won out as the living, spoken form in the Swiss cantons of Vaud, Valais, and Fribourg, while octante retreated into dictionaries and older texts. If you are learning Swiss French today, learn huitante. See the full huitante reference for the modern form and where it is used.

Where octante came from, and where it went

Early French had regular tens words that mirrored Latin: septante (from septuaginta), octante (from octoginta), and nonante (from nonaginta). Octante and its older variant oitante appear in medieval French and in early editions of the Academie francaise dictionary. In the 17th century, under the influence of grammarians such as Vaugelas and Menage, the Paris standard settled instead on the vigesimal soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, and quatre-vingt-dix, and octante was pushed out of the official language.

Reformers later argued the decimal forms were more logical: Condorcet, among others, promoted septante, octante, and nonante as clearer than the “four-twenties” arithmetic. Belgium and much of Switzerland kept septante and nonante, but for 80 they largely settled on quatre-vingts or, in three Swiss cantons, huitante. Octante itself became archaic almost everywhere, with one notable exception: it remains a living, everyday word in Acadian French, especially in the francophone communities of southwestern Nova Scotia.

Where octante is still heard

For the words that are still in everyday use, see septante (70), huitante (80), and nonante (90), or the 80 to 90 in French reference for every form in the range.

Frequently asked questions