seventeenth

Pluralseventeenths

1. 1
   adjective

   Coming after the sixteenth in order or rank; occupying position number 17 in a series.

   She finished in seventeenth place after a tough qualifying round.

   The treaty was signed on the seventeenth of June.

   Note

   Old English seofontēoþa gives the shape still in use: the number seventeen with the ordinal ending -th, the same suffix that turns six into sixth. Centuries are named this way, as when Theodore Edward Dowling's Gaza: A City of many Battles (1913) dates a people "from about the seventeenth century B.C." Like other ordinals, it does not compare. Nothing is more seventeenth than something else.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Any one of seventeen equal parts into which a whole is divided.

   Each shareholder received a seventeenth of the company's annual profit.

   Dividing the estate among the heirs left each with roughly a seventeenth.

   Note

   English fractions borrow their names from ordinals, so this noun is the ordinal adjective turned into a countable thing: a seventeenth, two seventeenths. It takes the article and the plural like any ordinary noun, and it sits naturally in arithmetic, where a seventeenth of 340 is 20.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A musical interval that spans two octaves and a third between its lowest and highest notes.

   The chord spanned a seventeenth from the lowest to the highest note.

   Adding a seventeenth above the bass gave the harmony a bright, open sound.

   Note

   Musicians count intervals inclusively, calling the lowest note one, and that is why two octaves and a third earn this name: the span covers seventeen steps of the scale from bottom to top. Its simple counterpart is the third. The seventeenth is that same third with two octaves opened up between the notes.

Showing meanings only. Show all 3