It’s my birthday! Yes it is, although I no longer like to advertise the fact. It’s also Thursday. But what day of the month is it?
You probably know that in English we use numbers like 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th (which we pronounce as first, second, third and fourth) when talking about dates. So yesterday was the 19th, which we say as nineteenth, and today is the 20th, which we say as…
How do we say 20th? I hear a lot of English learners say twentyth with two syllables, and that’s wrong. We say 20th as twentieth, a three-syllable word. Twen-ti-eth. Like this:
And what about the last day of April, which is the 30th? It isn’t thirtyth but thirtieth. Again we add an extra syllable in the middle: thir-ti-eth.
This isn’t just the case for dates. All the numbers from 20th to 90th that end in a zero are pronounced in a similar way. Here are some examples:
Dave is having his 40th (for-ti-eth) birthday party on Saturday.
There’s a great café on 60th (six-ti-eth) Street in Manhattan that I always go to.
Ronaldo scored the winning goal for Real Madrid in the 90th (nine-ti-eth) minute.
By the way, numbers like 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 20th are known as ordinal numbers because they describe the order of objects or events. I might write another post on ordinal numbers some other time, but after yesterday’s post and this one I’ll be avoiding numbers altogether for a while. I’m an English teacher, not a maths teacher.