# tenth

Pronunciation: say "TENTH" /tɛnθ/

## Adjective

1. Coming next in order after the ninth; corresponding to the number ten in a sequence.
   - Simple: Coming next in order after the ninth, at number ten in a row.
   - _The reading room is on the tenth floor of the library._
   - _Their team won the tenth match of the season last night._
3. Constituting one of ten equal parts of a whole.
   - Simple: Making up one of ten equal parts of something.
   - _The investor holds a tenth part of the company._
   - _They split the land so that each owner held a tenth portion._

## Noun

2. One of ten equal parts into which a whole is divided.
   - Simple: One of ten equal parts that something is divided into.
   - _The recipe calls for a tenth of a cup of oil._
   - _Roughly nine tenths of the iceberg lies beneath the surface._
4. The person or thing coming next after the ninth in a sequence; the one in the tenth position.
   - Simple: The person or thing that comes right after the ninth one in a row.
   - _Among the climbers, she was the tenth to reach the summit._
   - _Our guest was the tenth to arrive at the reception._
5. The interval between a tone and the tone ten degrees above it on the staff, equal to an octave plus a third.
   - Simple: A musical distance of ten notes up the scale from a starting note.
   - _The cellist stretched to play a tenth in the opening phrase._
   - _The arranger spread the harmony across a wide tenth._
6. A unit of length equal to one ten-thousandth of an inch, that is, a tenth of a mil.
   - Simple: A very tiny length equal to one ten-thousandth of an inch.
   - _He shaved a tenth off the diameter to meet the spec._
   - _The shop holds tolerances of a few tenths on critical surfaces._
7. A temporary tax granted to the king by Parliament, originally a tenth part of all the movable goods belonging to a subject. *(UK)*
   - Simple: A tax of one tenth of someone's belongings, once paid to the king.
   - _Parliament voted the king a tenth to fund the campaign in France._
   - _Collectors gathered the tenth from merchants across the shire._

## Verb

8. To divide something by ten, into ten equal parts.
   - Simple: To split something into ten equal parts.
   - _Accountants tenth the estate so each heir receives an equal portion._
   - _To tenth the dough, she cut it into ten even pieces._

## Origin

From Middle English tenth or tenthe, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *tehundô. Old English had tēoþa (which gave Modern English tithe), but the pull of the cardinal number "ten" led Middle English speakers to rebuild the regular ordinal and put the nasal consonant back in. It is equivalent to ten plus the ordinal suffix -th.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/tenth (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).