twenty

American  

[twen-tee, twuhn-] / ˈtwɛn ti, ˈtwʌn- /

noun

twenties plural

1. a cardinal number, 10 times 2.

2. a symbol for this number, as 20 or XX.

3. a set of this many persons or things.

4. Informal. a twenty-dollar bill.

   Can you give me two tens for a twenty?

5. twenties, the numbers, years, degrees, or the like, from 20 through 29, as in referring to numbered streets, indicating the years of a lifetime or of a century, or referring to degrees of temperature.

   He lives in the West Twenties. She's in her early twenties. The temperature must be in the high twenties today.

6. Slang. Also 20 location; ten-twenty.

   What’s your twenty?

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adjective

1. amounting to 20 in number.

twenty British  

/ ˈtwɛntɪ /

noun

1. the cardinal number that is the product of ten and two; a score See also number

2. a numeral, 20, XX, etc, representing this number

3. something representing, represented by, or consisting of 20 units

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determiner

1. 1. amounting to twenty

      twenty questions

   2. ( as pronoun )

      to order twenty

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• twenties
  plural

Etymology

Origin of twenty

First recorded before 900; Middle English; Old English twēntig; cognate with Old Frisian tw(e)intich, Old High German zweinzug ( German zwanzig ), Gothic twai tigjus two tens

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

twenty twenties

As Thomas Jefferson observed: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026

Engineers have guessed at where to grab hold, but Swift must have been altered by twenty years in orbit, according to Barber.

From BBC ● Jul. 3, 2026

"For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," says Kippenberg.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 4, 2026

A stew tastes better after two hours than twenty minutes.

From Salon ● Jun. 2, 2026

If tear drops could have made a fence post sprout roots and grow, that post would have grown twenty feet tall.

From "Summer of the Monkeys" by Wilson Rawls

It will also become warmer in Scotland and Northern Ireland with temperatures reaching the mid twenties.

From BBC ● Jul. 25, 2026

It will also become warmer in Scotland and Northern Ireland with temperatures reaching the mid to high twenties.

From BBC ● Jul. 25, 2026

"I think it's definitely shifting," said Nizier Lawrence, in his early twenties.

From Barron's ● Jul. 2, 2026

The Paris public prosecutor's office announced the death of a young man in his twenties after he crashed head-on into concrete blocks on a Paris ring road exit ramp on his motocross bike.

From Barron's ● May 31, 2026

Andrew and Carleton were in their early twenties and dazzlingly hip.

From "Becoming" by Michelle Obama