three score and ten

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for three score and ten is 19 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Seventy, being the number of years in a full lifetime of traditionally-expected duration.".

No misspelling variants are generated for three score and ten in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From the Bible, Psalm 90, verse 10: "The days of our years are three score and ten." 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 three score and ten, spelled T-H-R-E-E- -S-C-O-R-E- -A-N-D- -T-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.