fifty

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fifty is 5 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɪfti/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,376 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The cardinal number occurring after forty-nine and before fifty-one.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for fifty, with forms such as "ffifty", "ffity", and "fiffty". 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", "fits", "fist", 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 fifty, from Old English fīftiġ, from Proto-Germanic *fimf tigiwiz (“five tens”). By surface analysis, five + -ty. 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 fifty, spelled F-I-F-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.