| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| tithe |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  t th |
| NOUN: | 1a. A tenth part of one's annual income contributed voluntarily or due as a tax, especially for the support of the clergy or church. b. The institution or obligation of paying tithes. 2. A tax or assessment of one tenth. 3a. A tenth part. b. A very small part. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: tithed, tith·ing, tithes
| | TRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To contribute or pay a tenth part of (one's annual income). 2. To levy a tithe on. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | To pay a tithe. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old English t otha. See dek in Appendix I. | | OTHER FORMS: | tith a·ble (tth -bl) —ADJECTIVE
tither —NOUN
| | WORD HISTORY: | A tithe is a tenth, etymologically speaking; in fact, tithe is the old ordinal numeral in English. Sound changes in the prehistory of English are responsible for its looking so different from the word ten. Tithe goes back to a prehistoric West Germanic form *tehuntha-, formed from the cardinal numeral *tehun, “ten,” and the same ordinal suffix that survives in Modern English as –th. The n disappeared before the th in the West Germanic dialect area that gave rise to English, and eventually yielded the Old English form tothe, “tenth,” still not too different from the cardinal numeral ten. But over time, as the former became tithe and the latter ten, and as tithe developed the specialized meaning “a tenth part paid as a tax,” it grew harder to perceive a relationship between the two. The result was that speakers of English created a new word for the ordinal, tenth, built with the cardinal numeral ten on the pattern of the other regularly-formed ordinal numerals like sixth or seventh.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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