CENTURY • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Century

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/sˈɛntʃəri/ Listen

noun

Century n. (pl. centuries)

1.

A hundred; as, a century of sonnets; an aggregate of a hundred things. (Archaic.) "And on it said a century of prayers."

2.

A period of a hundred years; as, this event took place over two centuries ago. Note: Century, in the reckoning of time, although often used in a general way of any series of hundred consecutive years (as, a century of temperance work), usually signifies a division of the Christian era, consisting of a period of one hundred years ending with the hundredth year from which it is named; as, the first century (a. d. 1-100 inclusive); the seventh century (a.d. 601-700); the eighteenth century (a.d. 1701-1800). With words or phrases connecting it with some other system of chronology it is used of similar division of those eras; as, the first century of Rome (A.U.C. 1-100).

3.

(Rom. Antiq.)

(a)

A division of the Roman people formed according to their property, for the purpose of voting for civil officers.

(b)

One of sixty companies into which a legion of the army was divided. It was Commanded by a centurion.

Century plant (Bot.), the Agave Americana, formerly supposed to flower but once in a century; hence the name. See Agave.

The Magdeburg Centuries, an ecclesiastical history of the first thirteen centuries, arranged in thirteen volumes, compiled in the 16th century by Protestant scholars at Magdeburg.

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Etymology of 'Century'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Century" Quotes from Famous Books

... the start of him also in this astonishing invention. He advanced with mighty steps in his geometry, and was arrived at the very borders of infinity, but went no farther. Dr. Wallis, about the middle of the last century, was the first who reduced a fraction by a perpetual division to ...

— Letters on England • Voltaire

... there not some element of the picturesque in the processes of readjustment by which the emigrants of European stock have adapted themselves and are adapting themselves to the conditions of the New World? In some ways the nineteenth century is the most romantic of all; and the United States embody and express it as no other country. Is there not a picturesque side to the triumph of civilisation over barbarism? Is there nothing of the picturesque in the ...

— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... that Bronson Alcott inspired in those near to him is well known by those who have made a study of the remarkable group of men that formed a charmed literary circle in Concord in the middle of the last century, of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson was the distinguished leader; yet each additional proof gives an added warmth of color and a truer portrayal of the character of this quaint and original follower of the Greek philosophers and ...

— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott

... you something about another gallant young officer who entered the American navy at the close of the century, when he was hardly thirty years old. He was Jacob Jones, who lived until 1850. He was a lieutenant on the Philadelphia for two years, and was with that frigate when she ran on the rocks in the harbor of Tripoli. He was given command of the 18-gun sloop of war Wasp, which sailed from ...

— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... had hindered discovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should be certain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in a short time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was something much more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim has never yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever can ...

— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

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