Nineties

How to spell nineties

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nineties

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nineties mean?

1. nounThe years from 90 to 99 in a century, or the range of ages or temperatures between ninety and ninety-nine.

Nineties in a sentence

• The band first became famous in the nineties.

• Her grandfather stayed remarkably active well into his nineties.

Where does nineties come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word builds on "ninety", which descends from the Old English "nigontig", a compound of "nigon" meaning "nine" and "-tig", an old suffix that denoted a group of ten. The same "-tig" element survives across the English decade words from twenty through ninety, and it is a distant cousin of the standalone word "ten". When "ninety" is made plural to "nineties", the final "y" follows the regular English rule and shifts to "ies", which is exactly where the spelling trips people up: the silent "e" of "nine" is preserved in the plural even though the ear hears nothing there. The plural sense covering a span of years, such as the 1890s or 1990s, became common from the nineteenth century onward as people referred to decades by their tens. The parallel use for a person's age between ninety and ninety-nine, and for temperatures in that range, grew from the same simple plural.

How the word is built

• nine (the number)
• -ty (group of ten)
• -es (plural, with y changing to ie)