Ninety or ninty – which is correct?
English numerals can be confusing, especially when it comes to their spelling. One such numeral is derived from the number 9. Find out how to write the word for 90 correctly.
Ninety or ninty? How to spell numerals?
Some digits in English change their spelling and pronunciation when they are included in different numbers, for example five, which turns into fif- in fifteen and fifty. Some numerals don’t differ in pronunciation but have different spellings, for example, four (fourteen, but: forty) and other ones stay unchanged: six, sixteen, sixty. But what happens in numerals with the number 9, as in 19 and 90?
Is 90 ninety or ninty?
This number has the same spelling and pronunciation in its different numerical versions. The correct spelling is therefore: nine, nineteen and ninety. When the number is used in the plural to denote specific decades of centuries or people’s age, the same rule applies: 1890s (eighteen nineties) or ‘she was in her nineties’ (meaning 90+ years old).
So where did ‘ninty’ come from? Although it has the advantage of being one letter shorter, this rendition of the word is incorrect and probably comes from the variety of different spellings described above. There is no universal method of spelling out numbers, each digit has its own slightly different pattern, which can cause some confusion for language learners and native speakers alike.
Now we know how to spell ninety, let’s look at some examples in context.
Ninety or ninty – now it’s all clear! Examples from literature
It gave me a feeling of power to know I was circling the earth once each ninety minutes.
Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut’s Story (1994) – Michael Collins
Pablo Picasso lived into his nineties, and when he died, his obituary ran on the front page of newspapers.
The Mona Lisa Vanishes (2023) – Nicholas Day
“It’s a book about two high school athletes, actually. It was a documentary first, in the nineties. Then they expanded on it for the book.”
Love, Hate & Other Filters (2018) – Samira Ahmed
