Ninth

How to spell ninth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ninth

What does ninth mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the eighth and before the tenth in a sequence; ordinal form of nine.

Ninth in a sentence

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

• The runner finished in ninth place after a slow start.

Where does ninth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from Old English nigotha, the ordinal form built on nigon, meaning 'nine'. It belongs to the Germanic family of number words, with close cousins in Dutch negende and German neunte, all going back to a shared Proto-Germanic root and ultimately to a very old Indo-European word for the number nine. Over the centuries the spelling smoothed out, and crucially the final 'e' of 'nine' was dropped when the ordinal suffix '-th' was attached, giving us 'ninth' rather than the 'nineth' that writers so often expect. That missing 'e' is the heart of the spelling trap, because every other clue from the word 'nine' tempts you to keep it. The same suffix pattern survives across the ordinals, as in 'fourth' and 'tenth', where '-th' marks position in a sequence.

How the word is built

• nin- (from nine, dropping the final -e)
• -th (ordinal suffix)