Learn English – Why is ‘forty’ spelled without a ‘u’ in Canadian/British English

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I was writing in Word today (with the Canadian English dictionary enabled) and it kept putting a redline under "fourty" which I couldn't understand. A bit of searching says that, even in British and Canadian English, the spelling is indeed "forty" but without any real explanation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_%28number%29
http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/english/2006/06/forty_or_fourty.html

It seems slightly counter-intuitive as we learn to spell so many words with the extra 'u' in Canada, and of course, some Canadian websites will actually write "fourty".

http://www.hnb.ca/en/home/474-fourty-four-of-atlantic-canadas-best-invited-to-team-atlantic-summer-evaluation-camp

So why do we have four and fourteen, but not fourty?

Update: So I guess really the answer is that, unlike a lot of other words that may or may not be spelled with a 'u' in "recent" times (i.e. when American English became a standard), this has been spelt as "forty" for ages.

Best Answer

Before 1600, the OED gives citations where forty is spelled in various ways, but never with just an "o" vowel:

  • feuortig, feortiȝ, fuwerti, uourty (the "u" is really a "v"), fourty, fourthi, fourtie

This might possibly mean that there was some actual diphthong leading to these spellings; since most of these spellings occurred before there was any standardization, it is hard to tell either way.

In 1600, there are three citations, and, interestingly, all of them have just "o":

  • 1602 Contention Liberalitie & Prodigalitie i. iv. sig. B2, "Cham sure chaue come, vorty miles and twenty."
  • a1642 J. Suckling Poems (1646) 37, "And there did I see comming down Such folks as are not in our Town Vorty at least, in Pairs."
  • 1698 J. Fryer New Acct. E.-India & Persia 94, At the end of their Quarentine, which is Forty days.

(We can ignore the "v/f" alternation — something was apparently going with the voicing at the beginning of this word, but it probably has no bearing on the vowel following it.)

Aside from one citation in the 1700s that uses fourty, everything else from then on is written as forty.

One can only guess the reason for this change (at least with the information that I have) — whether it was pronunciation shifting or just orthographic simplification. But I might have an explanation for why this spelling took hold so swiftly in the 1600s: the Bible. The King James edition of the Bible was a major influence on the standards in English spelling. The KJV Bible was published in 1611 (begun in 1604), and (since I happen to have a KJV corpus handy) I see that there are 158 tokens with the spelling forty in KJV and 0 tokens for fourty.

So, even if the spelling of forty was following the whim of a handful of publishers, it got into the King James Bible, and that was that.

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