Tenth

Pronunciation

• UK IPA: /tÉ›nθ/
• Rhymes: -É›nθ

Origin

From Middle English. 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.

Adjective

1. The ordinal form of the number ten.

Abbreviations

Full definition of tenth

Noun

1. The person or thing in the tenth position.
2. One of ten equal parts of a whole.
• 2013-08-03, Boundary problems, 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. (music) 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. (UK, legal, historical, in the plural) 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.