nineties
pronunciation
How to pronounce nineties in British English:
UK 
How to pronounce nineties in American English:
US
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- Noun:
- the decade from 1890 to 1899
- the decade from 1990 to 1999
- the time of life between 90 and 100
Word Origin
- nineties (n.)
- 1857 as the years of someone's life between 90 and 99; from 1848 as the tenth decade of years in a given century; 1849 with reference to Fahrenheit temperature. See ninety. Many still live who remember those days; if the old men cannot tell you the exact date, they will say: 'It were in the nineties;' (etc.) ["Chambers's Journal," Nov. 1, 1856] In Britain, the naughty nineties was a popular name 1920s-30s for the 1890s, based on the notion of a relaxing of morality and mood in contrast to earlier Victorian times. In U.S., gay nineties in reference to the same decade is attested from 1927, and was the title of a regular nostalgia feature in "Life" magazine about that time. The long, dreary blue-law Sunday afternoons were periods of the Nineties which no amount of rosy retrospect will ever be able to recall as gay, especially to a normal healthy boy to whom all activities were taboo except G. A. Henty and the bound volumes of Leslie's Weekly of the Civil War. [Life, Sept. 1, 1927]
Example
- 1. Since the nineteen nineties , education has been required for all south africans from age seven to fifteen .
- 2. Khodorkovsky 's arrest , in 2003 , followed by two ludicrous show trials and imprisonment in the far east , was putin 's most blatant demonstration of power to the class of oligarchs that had made its fortune in the legal vacuum of the nineties .
- 3. In the nineteen nineties , gebisa ejeta and another purdue researcher , larry butler , identified the complex relationships between striga and sorghum plants .
- 4. In the nineteen eighties and nineties , an american television comedy series told about four older women living in miami , florida .
- 5. The owners of ninety-seven orchard street placed gas lighting in the building in the eighteen nineties .