Decade
A decade is a period of 10 years. The word is derived (via French) from the Ancient Greek dekas which means ten. This etymology is sometime confused with the Latin decas (ten) and dies (days), which is not correct. The other words for spans of years come from Latin: lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years).
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Famous quotes containing the word decade:
“Like those before it, this decade takes on the marketable subtleties of a private phenomenon: parenthood. Mothers are being teased out of the home and into the agora for a public trial. Are we doing it right? Do we have the right touch? The right toys? The right lights? Is our child going to grow up tall, thin and bright? Something private, and precious, has become public, vulgarized—and scored by impersonal judges.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down—not by solving the problem, but by deciding it’s their own damn fault.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)