century
Definitions
Cricket
- noun a batsman’s score of 100 runs or over made in a single inningsCitation ‘They dismissed Australia for 162 and then Myrtle Maclagan recorded the first century (119) in women’s Tests and put on a record opening stand of 145 with Betty Snowball’ (Cashman & Weaver 1991)Citation ‘At fifteen years, seven months and seventeen days, Sachin Tendulkar became the youngest Indian to score a century on debut in the Ranji Trophy’ (Purandare 2005)See also double century, half-century
Publishing
- noun (written as Century)an American typeface designed for the ‘Century’ magazine in 1895 by Theodore Lowe de Vinne, now mainly used in a form called ‘Century Schoolbook’
Slang
- noun £100 or $100. The word has been common in the argot of criminals, among others, for the last hundred years.
Sports
- noun 100 runs scored by one batsman
Origin & History of “century”
Latin centuria meant ‘group of one hundred’ (it was a derivative of centum ‘hundred’). among the specialized applications of this general sense, the most familiar to us today is that of a division of the Roman army consisting originally of a hundred soldiers (the title of its commander, centurion (14th c.) – Latin centuriō – derives from centuria). when English took the word over, however, it put it to other uses: it was first applied to ‘period of 100 years’ in the early 17th century, while ‘score of 100 or more in cricket’ comes from the mid 19th century.
