Eighth

How to spell eighth

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce eighth

What does eighth mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the seventh in a sequence; corresponding to the number eight in order.

Eighth in a sentence

• Her office is on the eighth floor of the building.

• The eighth item on the agenda was the budget review.

Where does eighth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English, where the number eight was eahta and the ordinal form was eahtotha, built by adding the ordinal ending that survives today as -th. The eahta itself traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor and ultimately to the same prehistoric Indo-European root that gave Latin octo and Greek okto, both still visible in words like 'octopus' and 'October'. The modern spelling is the product of centuries of layering: the 'gh' preserves a guttural sound that English speakers stopped pronouncing long ago, while the final -th simply marks the ordinal. The notorious trap is that 'eighth' is the only ordinal where the root already ends in a 't' sound, so the single written 't' has to do double duty for both the 'eight' and the 'th', which is why writers so often drop a letter and produce 'eigth' or 'eith'. Remembering that it is literally 'eight' plus 'h' is the cleanest guard against the error.

How the word is built

• eight (the number 8, from Old English eahta)
• -th (ordinal suffix forming the order word)