Word.ws English Dictionary

top 40

top 40 noun: a list of the current 40 songs that are most popular with the general public (variously measured).

Noun (1)

top 40 (countable and uncountable, plural top 40s)

  1. (countable) A list of the current 40 songs that are most popular with the general public (variously measured).
  2. (uncountable) A radio format for popular music, usually including the 40 most popular songs at a given time.
    • I was listening to a top 40 radio station.
    • Nearly every history of Top 40 launches from an anecdote about how radio station manager Todd Storz came up with the idea sometime between World War II and the early 1950s, watching with friends in a bar in Omaha as customers repeatedly punched up the same few songs on the jukebox.2014, Eric Weisbard, Top 40 Democracy […] , University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 4

Noun (2) capitalized: Top 40

Top 40 (countable and uncountable, plural Top 40s)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of top 40.

Forms of top 40

pluraltop 40s
alternative formTop 40
alternative formtop forty
pluralTop 40s

Questions about top 40

What does top 40 mean?
Top 40 means a list of the current 40 songs that are most popular with the general public (variously measured).
What part of speech is top 40?
Top 40 is a noun.
What is the plural of top 40?
The plural of top 40 is top 40s.

Words near top 40 in the dictionary

  1. Toowoomban
  2. Toowoon Bay
  3. Tooze
  4. Toozes
  5. top
  6. top 40
  7. top 40s
  8. top aerator
  9. top aerators
  10. top age
  11. top aged

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: top 40 (page history and authors); Top 40 (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “top 40.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/top_40. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.