Seventies

How to spell seventies

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce seventies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seventies mean?

1. nounThe years from 1970 to 1979 within a particular century.
2. nounThe span of a person's age from seventy to seventy-nine years.
3. nounA range of temperature readings between seventy and seventy-nine degrees.

Seventies in a sentence

• The band first found fame in the seventies.

• Both of her grandparents are now in their seventies.

• The forecast promised warm afternoons in the seventies.

• That style of wallpaper was everywhere during the seventies.

• He took up painting when he reached his seventies.

• The pool felt pleasant once the water hit the seventies.

Where does seventies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word builds on seven, which descends from the Old English seofon, a number word shared right across the Germanic family and ultimately traceable to an ancient Indo-European root for the same value. The ending -ty comes from the Old English suffix -tig, which signalled a group of ten, so seventy literally meant seven tens. To make the plural seventies, English follows its regular rule of turning a final y into ie before adding s, which is exactly where the spelling trap lives: writers must remember the i that appears in the plural but not in the singular. As a label for a decade, such as the 1970s, or for the range of someone's ages from seventy to seventy-nine, the plural form became common in modern usage. The same -ty pattern gives us sixty, eighty and ninety, all carrying that old sense of counting in tens.

How the word is built

• seven (from Old English seofon, the number seven)
• -ty (from -tig, marking a multiple of ten)
• -ies (plural ending, with y changing to ie)