twentieth century
33
1.0
- noun
- /ˈtwɛntiəθ ˈsɛnʧəri/
:
siglo XX
- Many significant social movements emerged during the twentieth century, including civil rights and feminism.
- early twentieth century
- late twentieth century
- nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Examples
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The invention of the Internet transformed communication in the twentieth century.
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The GATT is not equipped to cope with late twentieth-century international economic realities.
Academic text (1990) -
Ah, I love the music of the twentieth century!
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The transition is not a completely unique experience for the United States in the twentieth century, however.
Academic text (1999) -
We are all familiar with many tragic examples of this in the twentieth century.
Academic text (1999) -
The most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century.
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The great sponsor of programs for the foreign student in the early twentieth century was the YMCA.
Academic text (1990) -
Nativism and state formation during the early twentieth century continued to shape immigration policy.
Academic text (1999) -
Duke Ellington's music offers a wide range of options for introducing students to twentieth-century music of all types.
Academic text (1999) -
The interest in time management started in the late fifties and early sixties of the twentieth century.
Academic text (2011)
How Late
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the period from 1901 to 2000' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'twentieth' (the ordinal position) with 'century' (a span of one hundred years). This ordinal + time-unit composition is cross-linguistically common and follows standard counting/compositional rules, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Twentieth century literally means the twentieth group of one hundred years. Because a century is '100 years', the twentieth century refers to the years '1901 to 2000'.