Seventy

How to spell seventy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce seventy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seventy mean?

1. otherThe cardinal number equal to seven times ten; 70.

Seventy in a sentence

• The meeting hall held nearly seventy guests for the dinner.

• Her grandfather turned seventy this spring.

Where does seventy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Seventy descends from Old English hundseofontig, later shortened to seofontig, the standard way of naming the number seven tens. It is built from seofon, the Old English word for 'seven', plus the suffix -tig, which meant 'a group of ten' and survives today in all the multiples from twenty through ninety. The seofon element is itself part of a wide family of related forms across the Germanic languages, such as Dutch zeven and German sieben, all tracing back to a common ancestor shared with Latin septem and Greek hepta. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the v and the -ty ending, so the only real trap is remembering that it keeps the full 'seven' inside it rather than dropping a letter. The word has been in continuous everyday use since the earliest English texts, mostly for counting and for ages.

How the word is built

• seven (the number 7)
• -ty (suffix forming multiples of ten, from Old English -tig)