Third

How to spell third

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce third

What does third mean?

1. adjectiveComing after the second and before the fourth in order or sequence.
2. nounOne of three equal parts of a whole.

Third in a sentence

• adjective

  Her office is on the third floor of the building.

• noun

  Roughly a third of the staff work from home on Fridays.

• adjective

  This is the third time the printer has jammed today.

• noun

  She paid for the meal and each guest covered a third of the bill.

Where does third come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Old English, where the ordinal of 'three' was originally 'thridda', built directly on 'thri' (three) plus the ordinal ending. In the earliest English the spelling kept the r before the i, matching 'three', so people wrote and said something close to 'thrid'. Over the centuries the r and the vowel swapped places, a sound change called metathesis, turning 'thrid' into 'third'; the same kind of letter-flip explains why we say 'bird' rather than the older 'brid'. The root reaches back to the shared Germanic and Indo-European words for the number three, relatives of Latin 'tres' and Greek 'treis'. The modern spelling, with i before r, is exactly the trap: it no longer lines up neatly with 'three', because the letters quietly changed seats long ago.

How the word is built

• thir- (from three, with the old order of letters reversed)
• -d (ordinal suffix)