eighty
/ˈeɪti
/cardinal number (plural eighties)
1Equivalent to the product of eight and ten; ten less than ninety; 80: eighty miles north a buffet for eighty eighty of the nurses fled (Roman numeral: lxxx or LXXX) By the eve of the Revolution, eighty to ninety percent of rural households owned spinning wheels, and almost half owned looms....
- I think it's about eighty or ninety years old at most, but it has an extremely unusual quality.
- I read somewhere that a child, whose parents both smoke twenty a day, has inhaled the equivalent of eighty cigarettes worth of passive smoke in one year.
1.1 (eighties) The numbers from 80 to 89, especially the years of a century or of a person’s life: his grandmother was in her eighties...
- During the eighties he found himself seconded to the new ambulance control room, in Preston.
- It was in the eighties that underworld characters in the movies began to look more realistic.
- There had been a change in the nature of unemployment since the early eighties.
1.2Eighty years old: he was over eighty at the time...
- Cartoon Art Classes take place every Saturday from 10 to 11.30 a.m. for ages eight to eighty.
- I found that he had died in 1988 at the age of eighty.
- He passed away in 1996, near the age of eighty, but was a strong, feisty man.
1.3Eighty miles an hour: roaring down the highway doing eighty...
- When we got in the jeep he sped about eighty down the highway.
- You should've seen her last night, driving at seventy miles per hour going on eighty, blasting rock music.
- He pushed the speed up to eighty on a forty mile road.
Derivatives
eightieth
/ ordinal number ...- The thought of having to listen for eightieth time to some youngster reciting ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ and still having to retain some benign encouraging smile seems to me to be beyond the call of duty.
- The New Yorker celebrates its eightieth anniversary with a travelling exhibition of memorable cartoons inked by notable cartoonists from the past eight decades.
- Well, here we are, 2003 already, and next birthday will be my eightieth.
eightyfold
- An eightyfold increase in coal production led to the need for more lumber for mine props, timbers, and planks.
- In 2003, imports from China were worth $3.3 billion, an eightyfold rise over 1992.
Origin
Old English hunde(a)htatig, from hund (of uncertain origin) + e(a)hta 'eight' + -tig (see -ty2); the first element was lost early in the Middle English period.