HALF-CENTURY

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does half-century mean? 

• HALF-CENTURY (noun)
  The noun HALF-CENTURY has 1 sense:

1. a period of 50 years

  Familiarity information: HALF-CENTURY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HALF-CENTURY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A period of 50 years

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

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

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

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

century (a period of 100 years)

 Context examples 

Once he had the plants growing reliably, he observed what Janzen had seen in the wild a half-century before.

(Between ants and acacias, timing is everything, National Science Foundation)

"We're just fixing what has been damaged over the last half-century to push them back to where they were, taste-wise. We can make the supermarket tomato taste noticeably better."

(Scientists develop genetic path to tastier tomatoes, NSF)

Dead zones – where oxygen is effectively absent – have quadrupled in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s.

(Oceans running out of oxygen at unprecedented rate, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)