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eighteen

UK/ˈeɪ.tiːn/US/ˈeɪ(t).tin/
nounA1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: eighteens

Eighteen is the number after seventeen. The age at which British law treats you as an adult.

Voting, drinking, marrying without consent, serving on a jury and signing a contract all arrive at once, which makes it the single most important birthday in the legal calendar. Film classification uses it as the top certificate. Before 1970 the age of majority in Britain was twenty-one, which is why so many older songs and books treat that number as the real threshold.

Definitions of eighteen

  1. 1nouneighteenThe number after seventeen.A1

    “She turned eighteen the week before the election.”

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    eightetene

  2. English, today

    eighteen

From Middle English eightetene. From Middle English eightetene, eiȝtene, ehtetene, from Old English eahtatīene, eahtatēne, from Proto-Germanic ahtōutehun. Cognate with West Frisian achttjin, Dutch achttien, German achtzehn, Danish atten. Equivalent to eight + teen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 6 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

eighteen in the wild

  • The 1870s (pronounced "eighteen-seventies") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 1870, and ended on 31 December 1879.

    1870s

  • The 1850s (pronounced "eighteen-fifties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1850, and ended on December 31, 1859.

    1850s

  • A series of eighteen major anthologies, it contains the Eight Anthologies (Ettuthokai) and the Ten Idylls (Pattupattu).

    Eighteen Greater Texts

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.