A number that barely moved
Five is the English name for the integer after four. Speakers use it as a cardinal (five days), as a label for a set of that size (a basketball five), and, in North American slang, as a five-dollar bill. Those extra senses are later, everyday extensions. The numeral itself has meant the same quantity for as long as English has been written.
The origin of the word five is not a borrowing from French or Latin. It is a native Germanic numeral that English inherited and then reshaped through a handful of regular sound changes. The interesting story is how the form was rebuilt, not how the meaning drifted.
From Old English fīf
Old English already had fīf, recorded well before 1150. The form sits in a tight Germanic set: Old Frisian and Old Saxon fīf, Old Dutch fīf (later Dutch vijf), Old High German fimf, finf, and funf (later German fünf), Old Norse fimm, and Gothic fimf. Standard etymologies treat the English word as inherited from Germanic rather than taken from another language at a later date.
In Old English the numeral was often left uninflected when it stood before a noun. When it was used as a noun, or after the word it counted, it could take endings: nominative and accusative plural fīfe, genitive fīfa, dative fīfum. That small grammatical detail matters for the modern spelling. Between vowels the final fricative was voiced. Middle English therefore shows both voiceless-looking spellings such as fif and fyf and voiced ones such as five, fyve, vive, and vif. The voiced inflected type won out in the standard language. Southern Middle English also had forms beginning with v, a familiar regional pattern for words that began with f elsewhere.
The long vowel of fīf later followed the Great Vowel Shift, so the old long i became the diphthong heard in five today. The written v is a fossil of those inflected Old English forms, not a later borrowing of a foreign letter-shape for the number.
Why English has no m
The ancestor reconstructed for Proto-Germanic is *fimf (sometimes cited as *fimfe). That m is still visible in Gothic fimf and, in a rounded-vowel shape, in German fünf. English lost it. In the North Sea, or Ingvaeonic, group — Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and to some extent Old Dutch — a nasal consonant dropped before a voiceless fricative, and the preceding vowel lengthened to compensate. The same rule produced English tooth beside German Zahn, mouth beside Mund, goose beside Gans, and us beside uns. So *fimf became Old English fīf.
High German kept the nasal. The rounded vowel in fünf is usually explained as rounding of an earlier i between a labial consonant and a following nasal, already visible in late Old High German funf. North Germanic went another way. Old Icelandic fimm is often derived from assimilation of the cluster mf, though a back-formation from the stem of fifth has also been suggested. The East Norse vowels in Old Swedish fäm and Old Danish fæm are harder to account for; they may mix the numeral with an East Norse form of the ordinal stem. Those Scandinavian details are uncertain. The English line is not: the missing m is the Ingvaeonic change, and the long vowel is the compensation for that loss.
Dutch vijf shows that the North Sea development was not confined to English. German fünf is the useful contrast: same Germanic numeral, nasal still in place.
The Indo-European numeral
Behind Germanic *fimf stands Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe, the ordinary word for five across the family. Grimm's Law turned the initial *p into Germanic *f, which is why English has an f- where Latin has qu- and Greek has p-.
The middle of the word is less tidy. A fully regular Germanic reflex of *pénkʷe would be expected to keep a labiovelar in the second consonant, yielding something like **finhw rather than *fimf. What seems to have happened is assimilation: the internal *kʷ was pulled into line with the initial labial, giving a pair of f-sounds with a nasal between them. Italic and Celtic did the opposite, assimilating the initial *p to the internal labiovelar. That is why Latin has quinque and Welsh pump, while Greek pénte and Sanskrit páñca keep a clearer p-...k/c pattern. In Greek the labiovelar simplified before a front vowel; in Sanskrit it palatalized.
Once those branch-specific assimilations are allowed for, the cognates are easy to recognize: Greek pénte, Latin quinque, Sanskrit pañca, Avestan panca, Lithuanian penki, Old Church Slavonic pętĭ (Russian пять), Albanian pesë, Armenian hing, Welsh pump, Old Irish cóic, Tocharian A päñ and B piś, Persian panj. English speakers also meet the same root in later loans: penta- in pentagon, quinque- and quint- in quintet, Italian-French cinque, and punch as the name of a mixed drink, traditionally explained from a Hindi or related form of the five-numeral for a five-ingredient mixture. Those are separate arrivals. They are not the source of the native English word.
A link from the numeral to finger and fist is often proposed, on the idea that five is the count of one hand. The phonetic path is not straightforward. Finger is more securely from Proto-Germanic *fingraz, which may contain a reflex of *fimf plus a suffix; fist is harder to attach. The connection is plausible but not proven, and the numeral does not need it in order to be explained.
What stayed put
Unlike many common English words, five did not wander through a chain of figurative meanings before settling on its present sense. In Old English it already named the number. Later English added compounds and idioms — fifteen, fifty, five-star, five-and-ten, a high five — without changing the core. The history that matters is phonological: Grimm's Law, the irregular Germanic assimilation to *fimf, the Ingvaeonic loss of the nasal, voicing in inflected forms, and the Great Vowel Shift.
If you want a single fossil of that history, put English five next to German fünf. Both come from the same Germanic numeral. Only the North Sea languages dropped the m and lengthened the vowel. The German word still carries the nasal English lost more than a thousand years ago.