What to understand

Forty is the proper spelling the the number in all English variants despite the fact that four has a u. Often people will think that fourty is a brother variant like colour but this is also false.


Hello, everyone. We have actually an announcement. We space pleased/sorry to report the there is never a u in forty.

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That"s right: the word for the number 4 is four, yet ten times the is 40, which is spelled forty. This is true in all of the substantial English language, despite rumors that customers of brothers English choose the word come resemble colour (they don"t), and also despite the constant appearances the the misspelling out and also about.


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fourteen. But fortieth correlates to forty, so it also goes without a u.

There is no an excellent explanation for why forty lacks a u the its near-relation four has. Forty simply is, as American English Spelling author D.W. Cummings call it, one "ill-formed yet accepted spelling." the is, however, likewise a relatively new spelling.

Origins and Spelling Variants

While the word forty dates earlier to the language"s faster incarnation, the had many varied spellings over the centuries, and also the current spelling forty days only come the 16th century. The Oxford English Dictionary consists of a number of spellings the predate the one. Indigenous Old English (English together it existed from the 7th century to approximately 1100) there are the following:

féowertig

féowurtig

feuortig

But points really obtained going in center English—English as it existed between the 12th and also 15th centuries. In messages from that period the OED note the adhering to spellings:

fowwerrtig

feortig

feowerti (and fowerti)

feouwerti

feuwerti (and fuwerti)

fuerti

feowrti

fourte

fourti

vourti

vourty

forti

fourty

faurty

fourth

fourthy

Modern English carried us other options:

fourtie

fourtye

fortie

forty

vorty

The winner, that course, is forty, practically the critical of the bunch. The logical center English relic fourty, hiding many of the way down that long list, lasted until the 18th century, as soon as for factors unknown it fell out the use. Occasionally that"s just how it go in English.

See more: Which Number Is A Multiple Of 8 ? List Multiples Of A Number Calculator

References:

D.W. Cummings, American English Spelling (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins university Press, 1988), pgs. 28, 31.