Word.ws English Dictionary

fortyish

/ˈfɔː(ɹ).ti.ɪʃ/

fortyish adjective: close to the number forty.

Adjective

fortyish

  1. Close to the number forty
  2. About forty years old.
    • I’m going to start a support group of us fortyish guys with this problem. LUMPS, we’ll call our group. Losing Unwanted Midriff Plumpitude Sensibly.1994, Sam Cook, “[Gerbils and other realities of the forties] Too much me”, in If This Is Mid-Life… Where’s the Crisis?, Duluth, Minn.: Pfeifer-Hamilton, →ISBN, page 120

Numeral

fortyish

  1. Any number close to forty.
    • One problem it drops in our laps is to have developed all fortyish of its species within our temperate area, from the Falklands to the central temperate Andes.1993, Quarterly bulletin of the Alpine Garden Society, volumes 61-62, Alpine Garden Society (Great Britain), page 348
    • A great many black men are Mark Lawrence's age (fortyish), height (six-two-ish), weight (one-seventy-ish), and complexion (a reddish medium brown) that hints of a childhood of freckles and umber-red hair2003, Randall Robinson, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other

Examples of fortyish in a sentence

  • In my day, more often than not, you had to break rank to join the very few fortyish-aged women (renegades) promoted2004, Jean Lau Chin, The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination, page 46:
  • The day was cloudy, and the temperature was about fortyish.2006, Harold F. Kratch, One Soldier's Memories, page 109:

Origin of fortyish

From forty + -ish.

Questions about fortyish

What does fortyish mean?
Fortyish means close to the number forty.
How do you use fortyish in a sentence?
In my day, more often than not, you had to break rank to join the very few fortyish-aged women (renegades) promoted
What part of speech is fortyish?
Fortyish can be an adjective or a numeral.
How do you pronounce fortyish?
Fortyish is pronounced /ˈfɔː(ɹ).ti.ɪʃ/.

Words near fortyish in the dictionary

  1. fortyeightmo
  2. fortyeightmos
  3. fortyfive
  4. fortyfold
  5. fortyfour
  6. fortyish
  7. fortynine
  8. fortyodd
  9. fortyone
  10. fortypenny
  11. fortyseven

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fortyish (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-fortyish.wav.

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