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decade

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈdɛkeɪd//
  • United Kingdom//dəˈkeɪd//
  • Canada//ˈdɛkeɪd//
  • Canada//dəˈkeɪd//

A group, set, or series of ten , particularly

noun

  1. 1

    A group, set, or series of ten , particularly

    a decade of soldiers

  2. 2

    A group, set, or series of ten A period of ten years , particularly such a period beginning with a year ending in 0 and ending with a year ending in 9.

    The 1960s was a turbulent decade.

    I haven’t seen my cousin in over a decade!

    The repeated exposure, over decades, to most taxa here treated has resulted in repeated modifications of both diagnoses and discussions, as initial ideas of the various taxa underwent—often repeated—conceptual modification.

    Thru May: 1920s — The Decade That Roared. New exhibition portraying historical events and everyday life during the Roaring Twenties.

  3. 3

    A group, set, or series of ten A period of ten days, particularly those in the ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and French Revolutionary calendars.

    The year was divided up into twelve months renamed after the seasons [...]; each month comprised three ‘decades’ of ten days – with the décadi replacing Sundays as a day of rest; and each day was reconsecrated to a natural product or farming tool or technique.

  4. 4

    archaicA group, set, or series of ten A work in ten parts or books, particularly such divisions of Livy's History of Rome.

  5. 5

    A group, set, or series of ten A series of prayers counted on a rosary, typically consisting of an Our Father, followed by ten Hail Marys, and concluding with a Glory Be and sometimes the Fatima Prayer.

  6. 6

    A group, set, or series of ten Any of the sets of ten sequential braille characters with predictable patterns.

  7. 7

    A group, set, or series of ten A set of ten electronic devices used to represent digits.

  8. 8

    A set of resistors, capacitors, etc. connected so as to provide even increments between one and ten times a base electrical resistance.

  9. 9

    The interval between any two quantities having a ratio of 10 to 1.

    There are decades between 1.8 and 18, between 25 and 250 and between 0.03 and 0.003.

Etymology

From Middle English decade, from Old French decade, from Late Latin decādem (“(set of) ten”), from Ancient Greek δεκάς (dekás), from δέκα (déka, “ten”). In reference to a span of ten years, originally a clipping of the phrase decade of years. By surface analysis, dec- + -ade. Doublet of decad and dekad.

Forms

plural
decades
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).