Lui ha dei cavalli.
What does dei mean? The sentence comes from Duolingo, and it translates to
He has horses.
I looked up dei in my dictionary, but I am still confused as to what it means in the sentence above.
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1Please have a look at italian.stackexchange.com/questions/6027/… and italian.stackexchange.com/questions/2284/… (and also italian.stackexchange.com/questions/6501/…). If you still have doubts, please rephrase your question to cover something not covered in those previous questions. – DaG Sep 19 '16 at 14:08
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Moreover, that is definitely not a dictionary. That is a quite useless app. – DaG Sep 19 '16 at 14:08
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I guess I should have waited before I gave a possible duplicate answer! Sorry. – CasaMich Sep 20 '16 at 6:03
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Dei in this case is the so called articolo partitivo (partitive article). It means an undefined number of, and can be translated in English with some, a few, or, as in your example, nothing at all. the name partitivo expresses the concept that the quantity you are speaking about is a part of something that is numerable, and is approximate or uncertain, but greater than one. You use degli instead of dei whith the same rules that apply to the article gli instead of i.
You can think of the partitive article as the plural of the indefinite article, so, if you say:
ho scritto un libro
you might also say
ho scritto dei libri
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@JackMaddington dei is used with enumerable objects, so "number" stands for natural number, not relative integer, rational, real or complex! So, it cannot be zero, negative or imaginary. – CasaMich Sep 23 '16 at 6:27
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Many definitions of natural numbers, Peano's and other ones, include zero (but of course a partitive article implies a number greater than zero). – DaG Sep 28 '16 at 8:43
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