century

UK/ˈsɛn.t͡ʃʊɹ.i/US/ˈsɛn.(t)ʃ(ə.)ɹi/

nounB13 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,464 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: centuries

A century is a hundred years — long enough that nobody who saw the start of it is around at the end. Two centuries of the same family in the same farmhouse; a cathedral that took a century to finish; a tree planted a century ago.

It also names the numbered blocks of the calendar, and this is where people trip. The twentieth century is the 1900s, not the 1800s, because the first century ran from year 1 to year 100, so the number is always one ahead of the digits. Turn of the century means the years either side of the changeover, and centuries-old is the adjective for anything very old. In cricket a century is a hundred runs by one batter, and reaching it is the moment the crowd stands up. Loosely, centuries just means ages: the stone has been lying there for centuries.

Definitions of century

1nounperiodA period of one hundred years.B1~2%
“The oak has stood in that field for over a century.”
2nounnumberedOne of the numbered hundred-year blocks used for dating history.B1~96%
“The church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.”
3nouncenturyIn cricket, a score of a hundred runs by one batter.B1~2%
“He reached his century just before tea.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

century is a length of time.

Where it comes from

The word goes back to Latin centuria, built on centum, one hundred. Middle English centurie counted a hundred of anything — a hundred soldiers in a Roman division, a hundred-part measure of land — and the modern meaning is a shortening of the fuller phrase, a century of years.

Latin
centuria
Old French
centurie
Middle English
centurie — a count of one hundred (of anything); a division of the Roman army; century; a division of land
English, today
century

Built from

centum · Latin — one hundred

From Middle English centurie (“a count of one hundred (of anything); a division of the Roman army; century; a division of land”), from Old French centurie, from Latin centuria, from centum (“one hundred”). The most common modern use is an ellipsis of century of years.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Time & Calendar, History & Eras

Practise this word

century in the wild

The list below includes links to articles with further details for each millennium, century and decade from 15,000 BC to AD 3000.
List of decades, centuries, and millennia
The 20th century began on 1 January 1901, and ended on 31 December 2000.
20th century
Population growth was also unprecedented, as the century started with around 1.6 billion people, and ended with around 6.2 billion.
20th century
The 21st century is the current century in the Anno Domini or Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar.
21st century
French expansion resumed in the 19th century, beginning with the conquest of Algeria in 1830 and the establishment of influence in Africa.
19th century

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the centum family

century

century — used about once every 160 pages · #1,464 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of century

1nounperiodA period of one hundred years.B1~2%

“The oak has stood in that field for over a century.”

2nounnumberedOne of the numbered hundred-year blocks used for dating history.B1~96%

“The church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century.”

3nouncenturyIn cricket, a score of a hundred runs by one batter.B1~2%

“He reached his century just before tea.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

century is a length of time.