Forty

How to spell forty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce forty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does forty mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to four times ten, written 40.

Forty in a sentence

• The meeting lasted almost forty minutes longer than planned.

• She turned forty on her last birthday and barely noticed.

Where does forty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Forty comes from the Old English feowertig, a compound of feower meaning 'four' and the suffix -tig meaning 'a group of ten', so it literally meant 'four tens'. The same -tig element survives in twenty, thirty, fifty and the other tens, all of them rooted in the Germanic counting system. The curious thing about forty is its spelling, because the related words four and fourth keep the 'u' that forty has quietly lost. In Middle English the word was often written 'fourty' with the 'u', but the spelling settled into 'forty' by around the seventeenth century, probably reflecting the way the vowel was actually pronounced. That mismatch, four with a 'u' but forty without one, is exactly the trap that catches fluent adults who reasonably assume the family should be consistent.

How the word is built

• fo- (from feower: four)
• -ty (suffix meaning 'times ten')