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How to spell century

Century is spelled C-E-N-T-U-R-Y.

hear itcen·tu·ry/'sɛnʧəri/nounSilent and tricky

What it means: A period of one hundred years.

In a sentence: A century is one hundred years long.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear.

Same family: centuries, centennial, centigrade, centimeter, percent. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Century comes from the Latin word 'centuria,' meaning a group of one hundred, from 'centum' for 'hundred.' In ancient Rome, a 'centuria' was also a unit of soldiers, so the word originally had both a military and numerical meaning before becoming a time word.

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