Other forms: eras
An era is a long stretch of time that people look back on as one thing. The Victorian era, the era of the steam train, the era before everyone carried a phone.
An era is named by whatever defined it: a ruler, a machine, a war, a mood. In geology the word is exact rather than loose - an era is a formal unit built out of periods, so the Mesozoic era holds the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. It also names a counting system that starts from a fixed point, which is what the common era means beside a date. In ordinary use era, age and epoch trade places freely, though era is the grandest of the three. The end of an era is what people say when a long-serving manager, shop or building finally goes.
1nouneraA long period of history seen as having a character of its own.~79%
“Photographs from that era show a town full of chimneys.”
synonyms: age, epoch
2nounmajorA major division of geological time, made up of periods.~17%
“The Mesozoic era lasted roughly one hundred and eighty million years.”
3nounsystemA system of dating counted from a fixed starting point.~4%
“All dates in the catalogue are given in the common era.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
era is a period of time.
Also accepted in games: age, epoch
Latin
aera
English, today
era
Borrowed from Latin aera.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA