sixteenth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sixteenth is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌsɪksˈtiːnθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #17,720 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The ordinal form of the number sixteen.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for sixteenth, with forms such as "isxteenth", "sitxeenth", and "sixetenth". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "sixteen", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English sixtenthe, sixtethe, from Old English sixtēoþa, equivalent to sixteen + -th. 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 sixteenth, spelled S-I-X-T-E-E-N-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.