Sixth

How to spell sixth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sixth

What does sixth mean?

1. adjectiveComing after fifth and before seventh in a sequence; the ordinal of six.

Sixth in a sentence

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

• The sixth item on the agenda was the budget review.

Where does sixth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English ordinal sixta or siexta, the form used for the position after fifth. It was built on the cardinal number six, which goes back to the Old English siex and ultimately to a shared Germanic root (compare modern German sechs and Dutch zes) and a still older Indo-European ancestor that also produced Latin sex and Greek hex. The ordinal suffix -th, which English uses to turn cardinals into ordinals (fourth, sixth, tenth), is itself an ancient inheritance. The spelling trap lives in the tight consonant cluster at the end: the written word keeps every letter of six and then adds -th, giving the awkward but logical -xth ending. Because the tongue tends to collapse the 'ksth' sounds together in speech, writers sometimes drop a letter, yet the form is simply six with -th attached.

How the word is built

• six (the number)
• -th (ordinal suffix forming the position in a sequence)