two-thirds

English

Alternative forms

• two thirds

Noun

two-thirds (uncountable)

1. Two of three equal parts (2/3, ⅔, 0.666...).

   Synonym: 2/3rds

   two-thirds majority

   two-thirds of the population

   • 1960 December, “Talking of Trains: The railway and the Devon floods”, in Trains Illustrated, page 709:

     [...] at Cowley Bridge Junction, east of Exeter, both lines were impassable from about 1.30 p.m.—the first flooding of the junction for 36 years—and by the evening the water had risen two-thirds of the way up the platforms at St. Davids as Exeter faced its worst flooding for 60 years.

   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 186:

     Gilgamesh is himself a man, two-thirds god, one-third mortal.

   • 2000, Bob Foster, Birdum or Bust!, Henley Beach, SA: Seaview Press, page 123:

     [B]ut easily two-thirds of the work we carried out in this exercise was the de-bogging of other vehicles around the original one.

Usage notes

• Hyphenated fraction two-thirds is much more common than two thirds and is preferred by GPO manual.

Translations

two of three equal parts

• Cebuano: duha ka sikatulo
• Czech: dvě třetiny
• Finnish: kaksi kolmasosaa
• German: zwei Drittel
• Hungarian: kétharmad (hu)
• Polish: dwie trzecie
• Russian: две трети (dve treti)

See also

• Thesaurus:fraction
• Appendix:English numerals

Further reading

• “two-thirds”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “two-thirds”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• "two-thirds" in WordNet 3.1, Princeton University, 2011.
• Wikidata:⅔