century
ˈsen ch (ə)rē
noun ( pl. -ries)
1 a period of one hundred years : a century ago most people walked to work.
• a period of one hundred years reckoned from the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ : the fifteenth century
[as adj., in combination ] ( -century) a twentieth-century lifestyle.
2 a group of one hundred things.
3 a company in the ancient Roman army, originally of one hundred men.
• an ancient Roman political division for voting.
4 a bicycle race of one hundred miles : [as adj. ] the nation's largest single-day century ride.
• a score of one hundred in a sporting event.
DERIVATIVES
centurial
senˈt(y)oŏrēəl
adjective
ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 3) : from Latin centuria, from centum ‘hundred.’ Sense 1 dates from the early 17th cent.
USAGE 1 In contemporary use, a century is popularly calculated as beginning in a year that ends with ‘00,’ whereas the traditional system designates the ‘00’ year as the final year of a century. This discrepancy was particularly apparent on January 1, 2000, which was commercially celebrated worldwide as the first day of the 21st century, even though January 1, 2001, was regarded as the more proper date for this milestone. 2 Since the 1st century ran from the year 1 to the year 100, the ordinal number (i.e., second, third, fourth, etc.) used to denote the century will always be one digit higher than the corresponding cardinal digit(s). Thus, 1492 is a date in the 15th century, 1776 is a date in the 18th century, and so on.
family
ˈfam(ə)lē
noun ( pl. -lies)
1 [treated as sing. or pl. ] a group consisting of parents and children living together in a household.
• a group of people related to one another by blood or marriage : friends and family can provide support.
• the children of a person or couple : she has the sole responsibility for a large family.
• a person or people related to one and so to be treated with a special loyalty or intimacy : I could not turn him away, for he was family.
• a group of people united in criminal activity.
• Biology a principal taxonomic category that ranks above genus and below order, usually ending in -idae (in zoology) or -aceae (in botany).
• a group of objects united by a significant shared characteristic.
• Mathematics a group of curves or surfaces obtained by varying the value of a constant in the equation generating them.
2 all the descendants of a common ancestor : the house has been owned by the same family for 300 years.
• a race or group of peoples from a common stock.
• all the languages ultimately derived from a particular early language, regarded as a group : the Austronesian language family.
adjective [ attrib. ]
designed to be suitable for children as well as adults : a family newspaper.
PHRASES
the (or one's) family jewels informal a man's genitals.
in the family way informal pregnant.
ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 2; also denoting the servants of a household or the retinue of a nobleman) : from Latin familia ‘household servants, household, family,’ from famulus ‘servant.’
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