tenth
/tɛnθ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.92 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The person or thing coming next after the ninth in a series; that which is in the tenth position.
noun
The interval between any tone and the tone represented on the tenth degree of the staff above it, as between one of the scale and three of the octave above; the octave of the third.
noun
A temporary aid issuing out of personal property, and granted to the king by Parliament; formerly, the real tenth part of all the movables belonging to the subject.
British usage
noun
A tenth of a mil; a ten-thousandth of an inch.
Example Sentences
- "My dear young lady, here I am for the tenth time."
- "These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity."
- "A hunger strike at a South Florida immigration detention center state officials have named “Alligator Alcatraz” has entered its tenth day, as detainees protest what they call inhumane and dangerous living conditions."
- "The Ephah and the Bath shal be of one measure, that the Bath may containe the tenth part of an Homer, and the Ephah the tenth part of an Homer: the measure thereof shall be after the Homer."
- "Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month."
- "A regular cistern may be inched or tenthed by the rule given for inching or tenthing the back, copper, or cooler, which inching or tenthing should be entered in a table book for use."
Etymology
From Middle English tenth, tenthe. Old English had tēoþa (origin of Modern English tithe), but the force of analogy to the cardinal number "ten" caused Middle English speakers to recreate the regular ordinal and re-insert the nasal consonant. Ultimately from Proto-Germanic *tehundô. Equivalent to ten (numeral) + -th (suffix forming ordinals).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: tenth, -, *tehundô
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /tɛnθ/
- British English: /tɛnθ/
Usage
- British usage