CENTURY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does century mean? 

• CENTURY (noun)
  The noun CENTURY has 2 senses:

1. a period of 100 years

2. ten 10s

  Familiarity information: CENTURY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CENTURY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A period of 100 years

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Hypernyms ("century" is a kind of...):

period; period of time; time period (an amount of time)

Meronyms (parts of "century"):

decade; decennary; decennium (a period of 10 years)

half-century (a period of 50 years)

quarter-century (a period of 25 years)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "century"):

quattrocento (the 15th century in Italian art and literature)

twentieth century (the century from 1901 to 2000)

Holonyms ("century" is a part of...):

millenary; millennium (a span of 1000 years)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Ten 10s

Classified under:

Nouns denoting quantities and units of measure

Synonyms:

100; C; century; hundred; one C

Hypernyms ("century" is a kind of...):

large integer (an integer equal to or greater than ten)

 Context examples 

It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

‘The original has no date, but is in the spelling of the middle of the seventeenth century,’ remarked Musgrave.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was my first visit to the scene of the crime—a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The very place, where he have been alive, Un-Dead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

For an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Extracts of this oleoresin have been used as a folk medicine for centuries in Ayurdevic medicine in India.

(Boswellia serrata, NCI Thesaurus)

The Billy is a hound that was created in the nineteenth century by M.G. Hublot who cross-bred the Ceris, Montaimboeuf, and Larrye (now all extinct).

(Billy, NCI Thesaurus)

The researchers said deaths from coastal flooding would also increase sharply, from six deaths per year at the beginning of this century to 233 a year by the end of it.

(Study: Climate Change Will Bring 50-Fold Rise in Europe Weather-related Deaths, VOA News)

As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Through all the centuries and over all those southern waters nameless men have fought in nameless places, their sole monuments a protected coast and an unravaged country-side.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)