Century

How to spell century

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce century

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does century mean?

1. nounA period of one hundred years.
2. nounA score of one hundred runs by a single batter in cricket.

Century in a sentence

• The cathedral has stood for more than a century.

• The opener reached his century just before lunch.

• The painting dates from the previous century.

• She celebrated a brilliant century in the final innings.

Where does century come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin centuria, which originally named a group of one hundred things, most famously a unit of one hundred soldiers in the Roman army, and later a voting division of Roman citizens. The root is centum, the Latin for 'hundred', the same element that survives in 'cent', 'percent', and 'centimetre'. English borrowed centuria in the late 1400s, at first meaning a body of a hundred, and only in the early 1600s did it settle into its now dominant sense of a period of one hundred years. The spelling keeps the Latin -ury ending rather than a plain -ry, which is part of why the middle of the word can trip writers up. The link back to centum is the handy memory hook: a century is built on a hundred.

How the word is built

• cent- (from centum: hundred)
• -ury (noun suffix from -uria)