Someone recently visited my website after searching for the following phrase on Google:
fourty or forty canada
I don’t have an article devoted to this topic, so I thought I’d put one together in case others come along looking for the same thing.
The short version is that fourty is a misspelling of forty.
Despite Canadians using a U in words like colour and favour, there is no U in forty. Nor is there in American English or British English.
That’s the short version. The long version is a bit more complicated than that.
You see, forty started out as the Old English word fēowertig (fēower, meaning four + tig, meaning tens). Then by the time Middle English came along, it had evolved to fourty. Technically, there were multiple spellings—feowerti, feorti, fowerti, vourti, faurty, fuwerti, furty—and fourty just happened to be one of them.
Somewhere along the way, forty got into the mix. In fact, it’s been around since before the 12th century. And during the next 800 years, English speakers started favouring it over the more logical fourty, which has all but disappeared from contemporary English usage.
So, if you want to be pedantic about it, fourty is more of an archaic or obsolete spelling than it is an incorrect spelling. Good luck trying to convince anyone that your spelling of fourty is correct though. Whether or not you live in Canada.