Eleventh

How to spell eleventh

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce eleventh

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eleventh mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the tenth in a sequence; ordinal form of eleven.

Eleventh in a sentence

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

• The contract was signed on the eleventh of June.

Where does eleventh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the ordinal form of 'eleven', which traces back to the Old English endleofan, a word whose parts literally meant 'one left' (that is, one left over after counting ten). The same logic shaped 'twelve', from twelf, meaning 'two left' over ten, so both numbers carry an old idea of fingers remaining once the first ten are used up. The base word shares an ancestry with similar forms across the Germanic languages, such as the German elf and Dutch elf. The ordinal sense was made, as with most numbers, by adding the suffix -th, the same ending seen in 'fourth' and 'sixth'. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed second syllable swallows its vowel, so writers must remember the 'e' in 'elev' and the silent ordinal cluster '-nth' at the end.

How the word is built

• eleven (from Old English endleofan: one left over after ten)
• -th (ordinal suffix)