Fourth

How to spell fourth

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fourth

What does fourth mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the third and before the fifth in order or position.
2. nounOne of four equal parts of a whole; a quarter.

Fourth in a sentence

• adjective

  Her office is on the fourth floor of the building.

• noun

  Each guest received a fourth of the cake.

• adjective

  The fourth name on the list was misspelled.

• noun

  Only a fourth of the budget remained by autumn.

Where does fourth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from Old English, where the ordinal of the number four was written feortha or feowertha, built simply from feower, meaning 'four', plus the ordinal ending -tha. That ending is the same one that turns 'six' into 'sixth' and 'ten' into 'tenth', and it traces back to a shared Germanic pattern for marking position in a sequence. The base word 'four' itself comes from the Proto-Germanic fedwor, a cousin of the Latin quattuor and the Greek tessares, all reaching back to a common Indo-European root for the quantity four. The 'u' in the modern spelling was added later to keep 'fourth' visibly tied to 'four', which is why we write 'fourth' and not 'forth' even though they sound alike. That deliberate link to the parent number is the very thing that helps separate it from its homophone 'forth', which means 'forward' and has no 'u'.

How the word is built

• four (the number)
• -th (ordinal suffix)

Words that sound like fourth

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• forth: Forward in place, time, or order; out into view or action, as in setting something out or bringing it into being.