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| Ever wondered how we should say what's after "firstly, second, thirdly, fourthly"? Image from ©iStockphoto.com/SparkleArt |
Sorry guys, was too busy meeting the deadline for my term paper marking—yes marking. I literally vomitted gallons of blood in the process. Shocked at the level of written English level of the local Hong Kong students, which makes me understand why the universities want more students from mainland China.
In the process of marking, I came across these very common adverbs, "firstly","secondly", "thirdly", and some not so common such as "fourthly", "fifthly" and "sixthly".
Immediately, I can tell something does not sound right. I have heard of "firstly" all the way up to "fourthly", but not "fifthly" and on. It just sounds strange phonetically to me, which is why I prefer to use "first", "second", "third", "fourth", "fifth", "sixth" and so on if I expect the sequence to be longer than 4.
But the real question is, can we really use "fifthly", "sixthly" or even higher? And if we can, how popular are they as compared to the version without the suffix "-ly"?
Let's do a quick and easy search on BNC to see what the corpus say.
Data from BNC
Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground
What is intriguing is that, there are more "secondly" than "firstly". Why? The reason is pretty simple, because you can use "first" or "first of all" instead of "firstly" to start the sequence.
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| Data from BNC Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
Another interesting observation is, although you will expect the counts to drop as you go down the list, the "secondly--thirdly" drop is 72.2% while the "thirdly-fourthly" drop is around the same at 73%.
Once it gets to "fifthly", the count drops way below triple digits at 37 per 100 million words.
In other words, if we do a rough calculation, for every 22 writers in the UK, about 12 of them will use "firstly" while the other 10 will use "first of all" -- that is almost half-half; 21 of them will use "secondly" to talk about the next point, that's almost all of them (of course, otherwise, why would they want to say "first of all" or "firstly" if they do not have a second point); 6 of them will continue using "thirdly" whereas only 1 of them will use "fourthly".
Is "fifthly", "sixthly" and so on used in British English? Yes. Frequently? Definitely no.
Similar case is observed for American English.
Data from COCA
Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground
A huge difference between the American English and the British counterpart is that the Americans love to use "first of all" much much more than they use "firstly", exactly 34.8 times more, and they also tend not to use "fourthly" as there are only 37 instances per 450 million words, that is equivalent to 37 / 4.5 = 8 instances per 100 million words, much less than the use of the same word by the British at 137 instances per 100 million words, which implies that the British might like to count to "fourthly" much more than the Americans do.
Both the BNC and COCA shows that the native speakers do not go beyond "tenthly".
And just in case you are asking why there are 2 counts in "eighthly",
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| Examples of 2 counts in "eighthly" Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
Last but not least, if you are wondering which punctuation marks should I use before I write "firstly", "secondly", "thirdly", etc. Here's the tip:
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| Punctuation mark before "firstly" Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| Punctuation mark before "secondly" Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| Punctuation mark before "thirdly" Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| Punctuation mark before "lastly" Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
Finally, I give you the counts of "lastly" and "last but not least" ("finally" is left out because it can appear in other non-sequential sentences).
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| "lastly" in American English Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| 'lastly" in British English Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| 'last but not least" in American English Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
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| 'last but not least" in British English Images from COCA and Locky's English Playground |
Looking at both the results of "lastly" and "last but not least", we can say that in American English, "last but not least" is more common whereas "lastly" is more common in British English.
Summarizing the points, we get:
American English
| British English
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Bear in mind that nothing is absolute in this universe and the above analysis can be easily challenged in many ways, some of which are,
- "How do you know the words are not appearing when there is no sequence concerned?" Or,
- "Don't languages change with time?" Or,
- "BNC's data are from 1980s-1993, COCA's data are from 1990-2012, don't you think your comparisons are not fully accurate?"
- And many more.
But if you are asking these questions, you should first learn more about corpus and its creation. In short, the results from the analysis can be an excellent reference, and you know what "reference" means.
Resources:
thirdly, fourthly @ WordReference Forums
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=915022
sixthly @ WordReference.com Dictionary of English
http://www.wordreference.com/definition/sixthly
Firstly, Secondly/First, Second @ WordReference Forums
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=575644
Firstly, secondly, thirdly, etc. @ Grammarist
http://grammarist.com/usage/firstly-secondly-thirdly/
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
