sixty

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sixty is 5 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪksti/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,978 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 fifty-nine and before sixty-one, represented in Roman numerals as LX and in Arabic numerals as 60.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for sixty, with forms such as "isxty", "sitxy", and "sixtty". 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 17 confusable-pair relationships, "six", "sit", "site", 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 sixty, sexty, Old English sixtiġ, from Proto-Germanic *sehs tigiwiz (“sixty”), equivalent to six + -ty. Cognate with Scots sexty, saxty (“sixty”), Saterland Frisian säkstich (“sixty”), West Frisian sechstich (“sixty”), Dutch ze… 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 sixty, spelled S-I-X-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.