What to understand

Forty is the suitable spelling that the number in all English variants regardless of the reality that four consists of a u. Often world will believe that fourty is a british variant prefer colour but this is also false.


Hello, everyone. We have an announcement. We are pleased/sorry come report the there is never ever 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 assignment forty. This is true in all of the huge English language, regardless of rumors that customers of british English like the word come resemble colour (they don"t), and despite the constant appearances of the misspelling out and about.


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fourteen. But fortieth correlates to forty, therefore it too goes there is no a u.

There is no great explanation for why forty lacks a u the its near-relation four has. Forty simply is, together American English Spelling writer D.W. Cummings phone call it, one "ill-formed but accepted spelling." that is, however, also a relatively new spelling.

Origins and also Spelling Variants

While the word forty dates back to the language"s earliest incarnation, that had many varied spellings over the centuries, and the current spelling forty days only to the 16th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has a number of spellings the predate the one. From Old English (English together it existed from the 7th century to roughly 1100) there are the following:

féowertig

féowurtig

feuortig

But things really got going in center English—English together it existed between the 12th and also 15th centuries. In texts from that period the OED notes 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, the course, is forty, nearly the last of the bunch. The logical middle English relic fourty, hiding most of the way down that long list, lasted till the 18th century, once for reasons unknown it fell out that use. Occasionally that"s just exactly how it goes in English.

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References:

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