Thirdly

How to spell thirdly

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thirdly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thirdly mean?

1. adverbIn the third place; used to introduce the third item in a sequence of points or reasons.

Thirdly in a sentence

• Thirdly, the report recommends cutting travel costs across all departments.

• She explained that the plan was cheap, fast, and thirdly, easy to maintain.

Where does thirdly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built straightforwardly from the ordinal number 'third' plus the adverb-forming suffix '-ly'. The base 'third' descends from the Old English 'thridda', a metathesised form of the earlier 'thridda' related to 'thri', meaning the number three; the same Germanic root sits behind German 'dritte' and Dutch 'derde'. Over the centuries the older 'thrid' shifted its inner sounds so that the 'r' moved after the vowel, giving us the modern 'third', a change called metathesis. The suffix '-ly' comes from the Old English 'lice', meaning 'in the manner of', which English has long used to turn words into adverbs. 'Thirdly' itself appears in English by the 1500s as a tidy way to mark the third item in a spoken or written list. The spelling trap is simply remembering that the 'r' precedes the 'd' (thir-d, not thri-d), the very feature that the historical sound-swap created.

How the word is built

• third (ordinal of three, from Old English thridda)
• -ly (adverb suffix)