- The umpteenth time.
Ai slop with a melty watch.
Foe the umpteenth time, stop making ai generated memes. No one wants to see them
I never thought about the word, and I was a little skeptical of Wiktionary’s etymology.
From ump (“colloquial name for the dash “—” in Morse code”) + -teen.
From a Middle English rebracketing of a noumpere as an oumpere, from Old French nonper (“odd number, not even (as a tie-breaking arbitrator)”), from non (“not”) + per (“equal”), from Latin par (“equal”). Doublet of nonpareil.
But etymonline has basically the same answer. The idea that it came directly from military slang regarding Morse code makes it more believable. Plus I’ve heard umpty used before as an arbitrarily large number, specifically as umpty odd [something].
indefinite number, “many, a lot of,” by 1907, popularized in World War I army slang, from umpty + -teen.
1905, “of an indefinite number,” usually a large one, military slang; earlier it was Morse code slang for a dash; the form influenced by association with numerals such as twenty, thirty.
