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How to spell ninetieth

hear itnine·ti·eth/naɪ/adjectiveSilent and tricky

What it means: Coming next after the eighty-ninth.

In a sentence: It was Emma's ninetieth step in the game.

The part people get wrong

Watch for the order of ie. Often misspelled as nineteith or ninteith.

Same family: nine, nineteen, ninth, nineties, ninety-one. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Ninetieth comes from the Old English pattern of adding the ending “-eth” to number words to form ordinals, like tenth and hundredth. The base “ninety” itself goes back to Old English “nigontig,” meaning “nine tens.”

Patterns it uses: i before e?

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