What to Kcurrently

Forty is the correct spelling of the number in all English variants despite the truth that four contains a u. Often people will certainly believe that fourty is a British variant favor colour but this is additionally false.


Hello, everyone. We have actually an announcement. We are pleased/sorry to report that tbelow is never a u in forty.

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That"s right: the word for the number 4 is four, but ten times that is 40, which is spelled forty. This is true in every one of the substantial English language, despite rumors that users of British English favor the word to resemble colour (they don"t), and despite the frequent appearances of the misspelling out and around.


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fourteen. But fortieth correlates to forty, so it also goes without a u.

Tbelow is no great explanation for why forty lacks a u that its near-relation four has. Forty simply is, as American English Spelling author D.W. Cummings calls it, an "ill-formed however accepted spelling." It is, but, additionally a relatively brand-new spelling.

Origins and Spelling Variants

While the word forty dates earlier to the language"s earliest incarcountry, it had many kind of varied spellings over the centuries, and also the present spelling forty dates only to the 16th century. The Oxford English Thesaurus has a variety of spellings that preday that one. From Old English (English as it existed from the 7th century to about 1100) tright here are the following:

féowertig

féowurtig

feuortig

But points really obtained going in Center English—English as it existed between the 12th and 1fifth centuries. In messages from that duration the OED notes the complying with spellings:

fowwerrtig

feortig

feowerti (and fowerti)

feouwerti

feuwerti (and also fuwerti)

fuerti

feowrti

fourte

fourti

vourti

vourty

forti

fourty

faurty

fourth

fourthy

Modern English brought us other options:

fourtie

fourtye

fortie

forty

vorty

The winner, of course, is forty, almost the last of the bunch. The logical Middle English relic fourty, hiding many of the way down that long list, lasted till the 18th century, once for factors unwell-known it fell out of usage. Sometimes that"s just how it goes in English.

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References:

D.W. Cummings, Amerihave the right to English Spelling (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pgs. 28, 31.