eighty

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for eighty is 6 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈeɪ.ti/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,356 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The cardinal number occurring after seventy-nine and before eighty-one, represented in Roman numerals as LXXX and in Arabic numerals as 80.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for eighty, with forms such as "egihty", "eigghty", and "eighhty". 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, "eight", "eighth", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English eightety, eiȝti, eiȝtety, from Old English hundeahtatiġ, from Proto-Germanic *ahtōutēhundą (“eighty”), equivalent to eight + -ty. Cognate with Scots hechty, auchty (“eighty”), Saterland Frisian tachentich (“eighty”), West Frisi… 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 eighty, spelled E-I-G-H-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.