twentieth
/ˈtwɛn.ti.əθ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.80 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "As with most twentieth-century Chinese writers, little is known of Ts’ao Yü’s life. Though his ancestral home was Ch’ien-chiang 潛江, Hupei province, he himself was probably born in Tientsin in either 1909 or 1910."
- "The novel he lends his name to is an account of that life, taking more or less the form of a memoir set down in the years immediately after World War II by an old man mentally preparing for death, not quite at home in the twentieth century (and a little proud of it, stubbornly clinging to his eartrumpet), whose significant memories reach back to the early 1890s and beyond."
- "“A shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis has been witnessed in Asia in the course of the twentieth century,” wrote Olivier Vonk at the Maastricht Centre in a 2017 paper."
- "But in fact the antinomy of exceptionalism and assimilationism has been there all along, and otherwise puzzling decisions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become readily understandable when seen as moments when assimilationism was ascendant."
- "There are some glittering stats out there regarding Brassey: namely that he'd built around one-third of Britain's railways by the time he was in his early 40s, and that by the time of his death (aged 65) he was responsible for around one-twentieth of the world's railways."
Etymology
From earlier twenteth, twentith, from Middle English twentithe, twentiþe, from Old English twēntigoþa. Equivalent to twenty + -eth. Etymological notes twentith, twenteth is the expected development from Middle English twentithe, but in time, the opaque twent- was replaced by a more transparent twenty-, resulting in modern twentieth (in the speech varieties this occurred in, the weak vowel in the final syllable of twenteth, twentith was clearly distinct from that in twenty); similar processes explain the modern pronunciation of thirtieth, fourtieth, etc. This analogy was assisted by synizetic pronunciations of words such as carrying, which allowed twenteth, twentith to be interpreted as contractions of twentieth.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: twentithe, twēntigoþa
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈtwɛn.ti.əθ/
- British English: /ˈtwɛn.ti.əθ/