Why not forty

That has all sorts of implications. Grandparents may never get to know—or even meet—their grandchildren. Parents raising toddlers may find themselves dashing from the pre-school to the assisted-living center as they cope with the needs of their own aging parents. In the U. For the educated classes whose reduced fecundity has Douthat so worried, it seems the opposite is true.

Readers of both articles shouted points like these from the rooftops. In blog posts, on comment boards and in phone calls to radio shows, people wrung their hands alongside Shulevitz and denounced Douthat as an antediluvian scold.

This is not the way we live now. The countries did join G20 nations last month in agreeing to end financial support for new unabated coal plants overseas. COP So far, so good-ish. What's been agreed at COP26 so far? A really simple guide to climate change. Image source, Reuters. What is the coal pledge? What is COP26? Skip image gallery Tap or click to go through the gallery. Digging the grave for coal?

There are many questions outstanding. What about fossil fuels? Why the COP26 climate summit is important Simple guide to climate change Four ways to reduce your emissions What are top polluters doing to cut emissions? Life where it's too hot to work, too hot to sleep. View comments. But fortieth correlates to forty , so it too goes without a u.

There is no good explanation for why forty lacks a u that its near-relation four has. Forty simply is, as American English Spelling author D. Cummings calls it, an "ill-formed but accepted spelling.

While the word forty dates back to the language's earliest incarnation, it had many varied spellings over the centuries, and the current spelling forty dates only to the 16th century.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes a number of spellings that predate that one. From Old English English as it existed from the 7th century to around there are the following:. But things really got going in Middle English —English as it existed between the 12th and 15th centuries.

In texts from that period the OED notes the following spellings:. The winner, of course, is forty , nearly the last of the bunch. The logical Middle English relic fourty , hiding most of the way down that long list, lasted until the 18th century, when for reasons unknown it fell out of use.

Sometimes that's just how it goes in English. Oxford University Press. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!