English homophones
forth/fourth
"forth" is an adverb; "fourth" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "forth" arrives as an adverb, while "fourth" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "fo" then splits - "forth" (5 letters) vs "fourth" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across forth, fourth: fhort. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
forth
5 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCCC
Inventory fhort · no private letters vs siblings
fourth
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVCCC
Inventory fhortu · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "forth" when you mean: Forward in time, place or degree.
- Write "fourth" when you mean: The ordinal form of the number four.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (forth, fourth). Here's where to go from here.
- "fourth" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,562 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: flow · Flo. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.