What follows Nonet for 10, 11 and 12?

Question

As in - single, double, triple, quadruple, etc.

Answer 1

An interesting question.

Since you specifically asked about "nonet", I took that to mean that you mean "a group of 9, in the musical sense".

If you meant that you're looking for the "tuples" like quintuple, sextuple, skip to after the dashes.

solo - 1 person
duet - 2 people
trio - 3 people
quartet - 4 people
quintet - 5 people
sextet - 6 people
septet - 7 people
octet - 8 people
nonet - 9 people

I did a search of the web to see if I could find any documents that specifically gave names to musical groups of 10 or more. I found only one reference to a group of 10:

decet - 10 people (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_music ).

I found nothing for 11 or 12. (The sites I checked just called them "ensembles".) However, I can give an informed guess for those cases.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for numerical prefixes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_prefix ), you'll see that the pattern for these groups is following the Latin more than the Greek. (Which makes sense, since music notation is in Italian.)

So if I were going to make up words for a group of 11 and a group of 12, I'd go with:

undecet - 11 people
duodecet - 12 people

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If on the other hand, you did mean that you wanted to progression that starts with "single, double, triple", then you ought to have asked about a ...nonuple? Just in case that's what you meant, I'd say:

single
double
triple
quadruple
quintuple
sextuple
septuple
octuple
nonuple *
decuple
undecuple *
duodecuple *

The word for 10 is an actual English word. The words for 9 may or may not be (see http://www.uoregon.edu/~avenu/silly%20questions.htm#anchor7) 11 and 12 are inventions to follow the pattern.

Most times it's easier just to use the generic "n-tuple": 9-tuple, 10-tuple, etc.

See also http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/58758.html