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tenth

adjectivenounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//tɛnθ//
  • United Kingdom/[tʰɛn̪θ]/
  • //tɪnθ//

The ordinal numeral form of ten; next in order after that which is ninth.

adjective

  1. 1

    The ordinal numeral form of ten; next in order after that which is ninth.

    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.

  2. 2

    Being one of ten equal parts of a whole.

    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.

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).

noun

  1. 1

    The person or thing coming next after the ninth in a series; that which is in the tenth position.

  2. 2

    One of ten equal parts of a whole.

    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.

  3. 3

    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.

  4. 4

    historicalA 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.

  5. 5

    A tenth of a mil; a ten-thousandth of an inch.

verb

  1. 1

    To divide by ten, into tenths.

    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.

Forms

plural
tenths
past tense
tenthed
past participle
tenthed
present participle
tenthing
third person singular
tenths
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).