Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use forty in a sentence

40 example sentences · numeral, noun, adjective

Forty means the cardinal number occurring after thirty-nine and before forty-one, represented in Roman numerals as XL and in Arabic numerals as 40. Example: “Social workers should work on a maximum of forty active cases.”

More sentences with forty

  • Social workers should work on a maximum of forty active cases.From the entry case
  • I want to buy one that costs somewhere between forty and fifty dollars.From the entry between
  • I was in stasis for forty years before I woke up orbiting this poxy planet!From the entry stasis
  • The company took in more than forty million euros last year.From the entry take in
  • As you’re so tired, why not try to catch forty winks before you leave?From the entry forty winks
  • My ma was born in the forties and my pa was born in the seventies.From the entry forties
  • Two forties aircraft sat forgotten in the hangar until they were rediscovered by two trespassing teens.From the entry forties
  • I’ve seen your kicks, inmate: you’ve got forty cents to your name.From the entry kicks
  • The drive took forty minutes, stuck behind those farters from the backwoods.From the entry farter
  • I was bored to tears after forty minutes stuck in that elevator.From the entry bored to tears
  • Q: What's the market on such a thing, nowadays? A: Oh, no less than forty, I should reckon.From the entry market
  • She could do forty knots in good weather.From the entry she
  • He caught a body and got forty years in prison.From the entry body
  • My uncle ran a corner store for forty years.From the entry run
  • My grandparents' marriage lasted for forty years.From the entry marriage
  • Pat and Leslie's marriage to each other lasted forty years.From the entry marriage
  • Four, fourteen and forty are even numbers.From the entry even
  • She practised law for forty years before retiring.From the entry practise
  • She has experienced many sadnesses in her forty years.From the entry sadness
  • It rained for close to forty days and forty nights.From the entry close to
  • The end-to-end trip takes about forty minutes.From the entry end-to-end
  • I barely mentioned the band's name before he went off on one about how commercial the top forty is these days.From the entry go off on one
  • I’ve lived here forty years, man and boy.From the entry man and boy
  • He had taught school for forty years before retiring.From the entry teach school
  • She looked to be the wrong side of forty.From the entry the wrong side of
  • I’ve lived here forty years, woman and girl.From the entry woman and girl
  • I'm about to take this forty to the head.From the entry take something to the head
  • The land will pasture forty cows.From the entry pasture
  • Faced with a box full of hundreds of small parts and forty pages worth of assembly instructions, he could do little more than stand there and scratch his head.From the entry scratch one's head
  • Thirty-five or forty years later, every drummer in the world has to learn the Purdie shuffle.2024 April 11, Menzie Pittman, “23: Bernard Purdie”, in The New Musician: The Art of Entrepreneurship in Today's Music Business, →ISBN…. From the entry Purdie shuffle
  • Forty minutes and some change later, Georgia Tech flipped its fortunes with furiosity.2021 March 22, Brandon Sudge, “Tech women escape upset”, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, volume 73, number 81, page C8, column 1. From the entry furiosity
  • Still another forty or fifty yards away the creeklet gained speed purling over a bed of rocks.2020 February 25, Stephen Gresham, Brother Harmony and Sister Chaos, Crossroad Press. From the entry creeklet
  • “About forty dollars between us,” John lied, without blinking an eyelid.2017, Valerie Pixley, Monkeys in my Garden, →ISBN. From the entry without blinking an eyelid
  • The pig trap was just under forty feet long, but the final six-foot section was a deadleg.2015, Jonathan Waldman, Rust: The Longest War, →ISBN, page 246. From the entry deadleg
  • They have epic material so that it takes sometimes forty years to become a songman.2014, Anne Waldman, Laura Wright, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics: An Anthology. From the entry songman
  • You look at your forty pieces of scrip, and you think: 'Hmm.2013, Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: The Babysitting Recession. From the entry scrip
  • Here more than forty thousand agriculture laborers had been diverted to make iron and steel.2013, Xun Zhou, “Unnatural Disasters”, in Forgotten Voices of Mao's Great Famine, 1958-1962: An Oral History, Yale University Press…. From the entry Pingdingshan
  • I saw as many as forty of the little fricker; (ARVN) tryin to scramble onto one bird.2013 March 29, Jim Pepper, Not Your Ordinary Vietnam War Stories, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 83. From the entry fricker
  • I could barely walk, had lost almost forty pounds, and was undernourished and undergroomed.2012, Paul V. Stutzman, Hiking Through, page 162. From the entry undergroomed
  • Looks like we're going to have a majority of around thirty, forty seats.2011, Alex Wheatle, “It’s All Red on the Night”, in Brenton Brown, London: Arcadia Books, published 2013, →ISBN, page 260. From the entry mullered

Meaning of forty

  1. numeral The cardinal number occurring after thirty-nine and before forty-one, represented in Roman numerals as XL and in Arabic numerals as 40.
  2. noun A bottle (of beer) containing forty fluid ounces.
  3. adjective Resembling or characteristic of a fort.

Full definition of forty

Questions about forty in a sentence

How do you use forty in a sentence?
Forty is used as a numeral, noun and adjective. For example: “Social workers should work on a maximum of forty active cases.”
What is a short sentence with forty?
“The land will pasture forty cows.”
What does forty mean?
Forty means the cardinal number occurring after thirty-nine and before forty-one, represented in Roman numerals as XL and in Arabic numerals as 40.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forty (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use forty in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/forty. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.