eighth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for eighth is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /eɪtθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,125 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The ordinal form of the number eight.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for eighth, with forms such as "egihth", "eigghth", and "eighhth". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "eighty", "eight", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English eightethe, from Old English eahtoþa, from Proto-Germanic *ahtudô; equivalent to eight + -th (ordinal suffix). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is eighth, spelled E-I-G-H-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.