twentieth

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.

adj

1. The ordinal form of the number twenty.
   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. 1980, Christopher C. Rand, “Introduction”, in The Wilderness (Yüan-yeh) 原野, →LCCN, →OCLC, page viii

noun

1. A person or thing in the twentieth position.
2. One of twenty equal parts of a whole.
   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. December 29 2021, Stephen Roberts, “Stories and facts behind railway plaques: Chester (1848)”, in Rail, number 947, page 57