forty

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for forty is 5 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɔːti/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,130 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 thirty-nine and before forty-one, represented in Roman numerals as XL and in Arabic numerals as 40.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for forty, with forms such as "fforty", "forrty", and "fortty". 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, "fry", "foy", "fury", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fourti, feortiȝ, from Old English fēowertiġ, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *fedwōr tigiwiz (“forty”). By surface analysis, four + -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 forty, spelled F-O-R-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.