Thirds

How to spell thirds

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thirds

What does thirds mean?

1. nounMore than one of the parts you get when a whole is divided into three equal portions.

Thirds in a sentence

• Two thirds of the staff voted in favour of the new schedule.

• The dough was divided into thirds before shaping the loaves.

Where does thirds come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'third', which descends directly from the Old English 'thridda' (also written 'þridda'), the ordinal form of 'three'. The earliest spelling kept the 'r' before the vowel, much like the modern word still hides a tricky cluster of consonants. Over the medieval period English speakers swapped the order of the sounds, a process called metathesis, turning 'thridda' into the 'third' we write today; the same shuffle is why we say 'bird' rather than the older 'brid'. The root is shared right across the Germanic languages, and it ultimately traces back to the same ancient source that gives us 'three' itself. As a noun, 'thirds' simply names more than one of these fractional or ranked parts, as when something is divided into equal thirds.

How the word is built

• third (ordinal of three)
• -s (plural marker)