Tenth

How to spell tenth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tenth

What does tenth mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the ninth in a sequence; number ten in order.
2. nounOne of ten equal parts of a whole.

Tenth in a sentence

• adjective

  Her office is on the tenth floor of the building.

• noun

  A tenth of the budget was set aside for repairs.

• adjective

  They celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Rome.

• noun

  The recipe calls for roughly a tenth of a litre of cream.

Where does tenth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the native English number 'ten', which traces back to the Old English 'tien' or 'ten' and ultimately to a shared Germanic root also seen in the German 'zehn' and the Dutch 'tien'. The ending '-th' is the old English ordinal suffix used to turn a cardinal number into its ranking form, as in 'fourth', 'sixth' and 'seventh'. Older English actually used the form 'tegotha' or 'teotha', which over the medieval period was reshaped to match the plain word 'ten', giving the modern 'tenth'. The same '-th' suffix doubles as a way of naming fractions, which is why a 'tenth' is both the position after ninth and one of ten equal parts. Because the spelling simply stacks 'ten' and 'th', the only real trap is remembering that the final cluster is '-nth' and not the misheard '-th' alone.

How the word is built

• ten (the number ten)
• -th (ordinal/fraction suffix)