Meaning

The ordinal form of the number twenty..

Definitions by Sense

1. The ordinal form of the number twenty.
2. A person or thing in the twentieth position.
3. One of twenty equal parts of a whole.

Example Sentences

As with most twentieth-century Chinese writers, little is known of Ts’ao Yü’s life. Though his ancestral home was Ch’ien-chiang 潛江, Hupei province, he himself was probably born in Tientsin in either 1909 or 1910.

The novel he lends his name to is an account of that life, taking more or less the form of a memoir set down in the years immediately after World War II by an old man mentally preparing for death, not quite at home in the twentieth century (and a little proud of it, stubbornly clinging to his eartrumpet), whose significant memories reach back to the early 1890s and beyond.

“A shift from jus soli to jus sanguinis has been witnessed in Asia in the course of the twentieth century,” wrote Olivier Vonk at the Maastricht Centre in a 2017 paper.

But in fact the antinomy of exceptionalism and assimilationism has been there all along, and otherwise puzzling decisions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become readily understandable when seen as moments when assimilationism was ascendant.

There are some glittering stats out there regarding Brassey: namely that he'd built around one-third of Britain's railways by the time he was in his early 40s, and that by the time of his death (aged 65) he was responsible for around one-twentieth of the world's railways.

Word Forms

• twentieths

Synonyms for twentieth

Related Words

When Should You Use Twentieth?

Use twentieth when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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