century
part of speech
noun (a century, centuries)
meaning for a pupil
1) A century is a period of one hundred years. tree →
2) A century also means one of the hundred-year periods counted in history, such as «the twenty-first century» (the one we live in now). tree →
3) In cricket a century is a score of one hundred runs by one player. tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths a century is 100 years: 2 centuries = 200 years, half a century = 50 years. In history lessons centuries help to say when things happened, like the century when cars were invented. In sport (cricket in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland) a batter who scores 100 runs makes a century. Phrases: a century ago, for centuries, the turn of the century.
examples
- A century is one hundred years. tree →
- This old oak tree has stood here for more than a century. tree →
- Castles were built many centuries ago. tree →
- Half a century is fifty years. tree →
- People have played football for centuries. tree →
- The batter scored a century in the cricket match. tree →
- In which century were trains invented? tree →
- A turtle can live for about a century. tree →
- But that century passed, and no one freed me. tree →
note
Plural: centuries (y → ies). The word comes from the Latin for «hundred», like «cent» and «centimetre». Trap: the century number is one more than the hundreds of the years — years beginning «19..» belong to the twentieth century. In maths problems: 1 century = 100 years = 10 decades.
In the corpora
- The steel pan was developed in Trinidad and Tobago in the 20th century from oil drums and is its national instrument.
- Bird droppings piled up for centuries on islands were once mined as a rich fertiliser.
- Real people of those centuries lived through colder winters, failed harvests and hurricanes that sank many Spanish treasure ships.
- Fossil fuels are non-renewable: they took millions of years to form and we are using them up in centuries.
- The Vedas are very old sacred hymns, learned by heart and passed on by speaking for many centuries before being written down.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «century» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.