fifth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fifth is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɪfθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,719 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 five.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for fifth, with forms such as "ffifth", "ffith", and "fiffth". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "fit", "fish", "fits", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *pénkʷe From Middle English fifthe, fifte, fift, from Old English fīfta (“fifth”), from Proto-Germanic *fimftô (“fifth”) or *femftô, equivalent to five + -th (ordinal suffix). Cognate with Scots fift, fyft (“fifth”), North Frisian fyfde (“fifth”),… 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 fifth, spelled F-I-F-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.