fourth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fourth is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɔːθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,562 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 four.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for fourth, with forms such as "ffourth", "foruth", and "fourht". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "four", "fort", "forth", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English fourthe, an alteration (due to four) of ferthe, from Old English fēorþa, fēowerþa, from Proto-West Germanic *feurþō, from Proto-Germanic *fedurþô, equivalent to four + -th (ordinal suffix). Cognates Compare West Frisian fjirde,… 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 fourth, spelled F-O-U-R-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.