Forty or Fourty?

Susan asks:
We are having a great discussion at work as to the correct Canadian spelling of the word forty. My colleague and I remember learning to spell it 'fourty' - about 40 years ago at school in Toronto! Other officemates as old or older than us have always spelled it 'forty' (schooled in Montreal and Cape Breton).

Do you have the official word on this spelling? I know the Americans spell it forty - I was hoping we didn't!

Canadians generally follow the British "our" spelling for words like labour and neighbour and harbour. But forty is forty everywhere. I've certainly seen it spelled "fourty" by many of my students here in British Columbia, but it's as wrong in Canada as it is in the US, Australia, and everywhere else.

Logically, "fourty" makes sense: four, fourteen, fourty. But English and logic don't always agree, and this is one of those cases.

Comments

[ShayeGramiak]

I was docked a mark on a test for spelling it fourty

[Christian Shelton]

Historically, it was spelt as "fourty". However, modern spelling conventions prefer that you spell it without the u. When someone says that fourty with a u is wrong, they know nothing about the history of their own language.