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Eighties   /ˈeɪtiz/   Listen
Eighties

noun
1.
The decade from 1880 to 1889.  Synonym: 1880s.
2.
The decade from 1980 to 1989.  Synonym: 1980s.
3.
The time of life between 80 and 90.  Synonym: mid-eighties.






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"Eighties" Quotes from Famous Books



... after me. The turbine howled as the driver gunned us up on the air cushion and sent us skimming away. The trip lasted only four or five minutes through the thinning traffic of late evening. We pulled up in front of a brownstone house in the upper Eighties that reared up four stories among a string ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... energetic and important fiction now being written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... were powerless there to change ways of life, as they have always been, but two parallel bars of steel reaching across the prairies brought change with them, and it was great and sudden. The railroad reached the Rio Grande Valley early in the eighties, and it smashed the colourful barbaric pattern of the old life as the ruthless fist of an infidel might smash a stained glass window. The metropolis of the northern valley in those days was a sleepy little adobe town of a few hundred people, reclining about its dusty plaza near the river. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... name of Gray is inseparably associated with the Freeman's Journal. Under the direction of Dr. John Gray this newspaper became in the sixties and seventies the most powerful organ of public opinion in Ireland; and in the eighties it was raised still higher in ability and influence by his son and successor, Edmund Dwyer Gray. In the south of Ireland the most influential daily newspaper is the Cork Examiner, which was founded in 1841 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... unanswered in very many minds. It has always been feared that women would lower the standard of scholarship; and there is much in the quality of the present generation of women students that may strengthen this belief. In the seventies and eighties, the fear of being thought peculiar still kept many ordinary women away from colleges. Now it has become fashionable, and a woman who has been to college stands better in a community than one who has not. Add to this the freedom and romance of "going to college" and it follows that many young ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... and well-developed agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and service sectors, Brazil's economy outweighs that of all other South American countries and is expanding its presence in world markets. In the late eighties and early nineties, high inflation hindered economic activity and investment. The Real Plan, instituted in the spring of 1994, sought to break inflationary expectations by pegging the real to the US dollar. Inflation was brought down to single digit annual ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... an affection for Voisin's, perhaps because of its nearness to the street of the Embassies; and in the "eighties" the attaches of the British Embassy used to breakfast there every day. Nowadays, the clientele seems to me to be a mixture of the best type of the English and Americans passing through Paris, and the more elderly amongst the statesmen, ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard

... into a beastly furnace, he would take care to let Spencer know. He pointed out that just because it was his habit to warm the study during the winter months, there was no reason why Spencer should light the gas-stove on an afternoon in the summer term when the thermometer was in the eighties. Spencer thought he might want some muffins cooked for tea, did he? Kennedy earnestly advised Spencer to give up thinking, as Nature had not equipped him for the strain. Thinking necessitated mental ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... of the river, for joy at their escape, whilst a number of wretched girls, paramours of some of them, were perishing in the waters of the swollen river in an attempt to follow them; they themselves passed over by eighties and by hundreds, arm in arm, for mutual safety, without the loss of a man, but they left the poor paramours to shift for themselves, nor did any of these canny people after passing the stream dash back to rescue a single female life,—no, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... secured and another afternoon's march against a fifty-mile wind with a temperature at -20 degrees F. brought the party three and a quarter miles further, to a point eleven and three-quarter miles south of the Hut. The wind rose to the eighties during the night, and there were many small holes in the tent which provided more ventilation than was agreeable. As the wind was too strong for travelling on the 12th, it was decided to make a cave in case ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... liked so well, were works of art, sculpture, such as he did. Yet she had never thought of them as important, important as oatmeal or delicate soap. She made up her mind to ask him about it, when she saw that they had reached the Eighties; she was ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... if it ever comes, will have the worst effects. I dislike him. Sally. He is, I think, without exception, the most selfish and self-centred young man of my acquaintance. He reminds me very much of old Billy Fothergill, with whom I toured a good deal in the later eighties. Did I ever tell you the story of Billy and the ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... Thanks." She produced a cigarette and lit it. "Granny's got a lot of ancient photographs of her girlhood friends," she remarked with her insolent eyes on Madame Zattiany, "and one of them's enough like you to be you masquerading in the get-up of the eighties. Comes back to me. Just before mother left I heard her discussing you with a bunch of her friends. Isn't there some mystery ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... fifties and ends thirty years later in the early eighties of last century. It then found its way into the Buenos Ayres newspapers, and I heard it at the time but had utterly forgotten it until this Florida paper came into ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... overloading his operas with orchestration, and of writing music which it was impossible to sing—accusations which sound strangely familiar to those who are old enough to remember the reception of Wagner in the seventies and eighties. His scores would not sound very elaborate nowadays, nor do his melodies appear unusually tortuous or exacting, but he insisted upon violent contrasts from his singers as well as from his orchestra, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... during the eighties and nineties, it looked as if these doctrines were generally accepted, and the divorce between art and the community had become permanent. But it seems as if this attitude, which coincided with a period of reaction in political matters ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... coming of the settlers, Father De Smet spent nearly forty years among the tribes of the great Western plains and in the Rocky Mountain region. Other missionaries in Western Canada penetrated the North as far as the Arctic Circle. In the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, a frail and slender man, in the person of the learned and saintly Archbishop Charles J. Seghers, journeyed thousands of miles, to bring the message of the Master to the red men in the vast territory of distant Alaska. In California, Arizona and Texas, the traveler ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... Goodman. These were different Goodmans but they were kin to these others. There was a large family of them. I don't know the correct age of my grandmother but she was up in the eighties when she died. ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration

... Theosophical Society, which came next, is best known to general readers, but is only an episode in its history. In the early "eighties," we find the society pro-Buddhist, and apparently identifying Buddhism with "the ancient glories of India, spiritual and intellectual," that the society was professedly desirous to revive. We associate the period with the publication ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... gray and white before them, resentful of the fact that dress parade was wofully late and long, with tattoo and taps only two hours or so away. The season for the regular summer "hops" had not yet begun, for this was away back in the eighties, when many another old West Point fashion still prevailed; but there was to be an informal dance in the dining-room of the hotel, and it couldn't come off until after supper, and supper had to be served to some people who were "pokey" enough to care to come by late boat, or later ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King

... the year past. But they didn't keep us from joining hands in bipartisan cooperation to stop a long decline that had drained this nation's spirit and eroded its health. There is renewed energy and optimism throughout the land. America is back, standing tall, looking to the eighties with courage, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... the key to the powder magazine. More than once Morier was approached on the delicate question of the admission of Spain to the council of the Great Powers. In Egypt, where so many foreign interests were involved, and where Great Britain suffered, in the 'eighties, from so many diplomatic intrigues, Spain might easily find an opening for her ambitions. She might advance the plea that the Suez Canal was the direct route to her colonies in the Philippines. Germany, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... German text. It is that of Mrs. Olga Wisinger-Florian, a well-known Viennese painter of floral pieces, whose work is represented in many of the big galleries in Europe. She was born in 1844, made her name in the early eighties, and is still living. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler

... up to that time the smallest coin in use in the West, as the dime, or "short bit," was until a more recent date on the Pacific coast. The Daily News was more distinguished for its enterprise in gathering news and getting it out on the street before the comparative blanket sheets of the early eighties than for its editorial views or ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... Slavs, Italians, Greeks or Portuguese" who are now arriving. "This does not hold, however, for currents created by race discrimination or oppression. The Armenian, Syrian, Finnish and Russo-Hebrew streams seem representative, and the first wave of Hebrews out of Russia in the eighties was superior." ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... dates—Lived in Mississippi until the eighties, then moved to Helena, Arkansas. Moved from Helena to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... Mr. Lang did, "under the species of eternity" which verse confers, for "(Miss Braddon and) Gaboriau." I have known those who preferred that other Viscount, "Richard O'Monroy"—who shared with "Gyp" and Armand Silvestre the cheerful office of cheering the cheerable during the 'eighties and later—to the more canonical possessor of the title before him. But du Terrail was what I believe is called, in Scottish "kirk" language, a "supply"—a person who could undertake the duty of filling gaps—of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... an astonishing conclusion. He connected the presence of these birds with the remark-able exodus of wild pigeons from their haunts in the United States in the eighties. Millions of pigeons at that time took their annual flight southward from Michigan, Indiana and other states in that region, and were never seen again. What became of this prodigious cloud of birds still remains a mystery. Knapendyke ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... 'you know Charnay, then? It was he who took me there first. Early 'eighties, I think.' He pulled out another volume and turned to the title-page. 'Here we are, "The Ancient Cities of the New World," '87. My copy is only the translation, published two years after the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... intelligence. Of course there was no dearth of scholars and clever, brilliant people, but insuperable obstacles seemed to prevent their social contact with one another. Outside of Moses Mendelssohn's house, until the end of the eighties the only rendezvous of wits, scholars, and literary men, the preference was for magnificent banquets and noisy carousals, each rank entertaining its own members. In the middle class, the burghers, the social instinct had not awakened at all. Alexander ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... had a different explanation for the bomb which had disabled their craft. Jones, the electrician, had just finished reading the adventures of a young British gunner in these very waters somewhere back in the eighties. The story had to do with the defense of seal fisheries against the Japs, and Jones was sure that a Japanese seal-poaching boat had bombed them. McPherson, who had seen active service chasing German subs, was certain they ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell

... years before the study of history and institutions reached the eighties and began to place events in their true proportion. Then it appeared that there was in fact a fundamental economic problem and that the political issues of the decade faced it from ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... eighties at least, and probably for some years before, the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him could ever thereafter forget ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw

... to create a purely proletarian movement. As we have seen, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height Plechanov and his disciples had proclaimed its futility and pinned their faith to the nascent class of industrial wage-workers. In the early 'eighties this class was so small in Russia that it seemed to many of the best and clearest minds of the revolutionary movement quite hopeless to rely upon it. Plechanov was derided as a mere theorist and closet ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... eighties that Maggie and John Corbett decided to come farther west. The cry of free land for the asking was coming to many ears, and at Maggie's table it was daily discussed. They sold out the contents of their house, and, purchasing oxen and a covered wagon, they made the long overland journey. ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung

... its economics, and the Byronic element in literature. The later swing back was as inevitable as Carlyle had been. Perhaps it was most clearly noticed after the deaths of Browning and Tennyson, in the late eighties and the early nineties. But both before and since that time it has been ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... Links" nor so magnificent a parable as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" will ever cease to be esteemed. How well I remember the eagerness, the delight with which I read those early tales in "Cornhill" away back in the late seventies and early eighties. They were unsigned, after the old unfair fashion, but no man with any sense of prose could fail to know that they were all by the same author. Only years afterwards did I learn who that ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the family. Aside from the habit of Dic's visits, and growing out of them, Madam Bays had dim outlines of a future purpose. Dic's father, who was dead, had been considered well-to-do among his neighbors. He had died seized of four "eighties," all paid for, and two-thirds cleared for cultivation. Eighty acres of cleared bottom land was looked upon as a fair farm. One might own a thousand acres of rich soil covered with as fine oak, walnut, and poplar ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... eighties there came famine in Russia, followed by agrarian troubles. I saw a crowd of peasants demand from a local landlord all the grain and foodstuffs in his granary. This puzzled me; I could not understand how honest men were indulging in what seemed to be highway robbery. But I noted ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... have neighbors,—he got it more and more into his head that they were his neighbors, and that he belonged there. He decided to settle down in those parts. Things in general seemed to be shifting into a new mode of life and impelling him to go along. In the early eighties, central Texas was becoming tightly fenced; the barb wire was spreading out generally; railroads were hauling herds where formerly they went afoot; shorthorn bulls were changing the face of nature; it was plain to ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart

... youth spent many years in the de Beers mining compounds, working with Natives of nearly all African tribes. He was war correspondent in Ashanti and other parts of Africa, and also with the Republican troops under General Joubert in the Northern Transvaal in the 'eighties, and saw the Boers (whose primitive artillery could not dislodge a native tribe that was impregnably entrenched inside a cave) closing up the mouth of the cave and sealing up the masonry, then leaving the Natives, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... sin entangled;' but this was probably a pious exaggeration. Only some one young and intellectually very vigorous could have penned her startling numbers. I suggest that she retained more of her youth than, from religious motives, she thought it proper to admit. In the 'eighties, when incense was burned in drawing-rooms, and people were talking about 'The Blessed Damozel,' she ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... all right, Mrs. Grange. It's all right. You see, Uncle Averill wasn't a young man. He must have been in his eighties." ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder

... now was to see Ginger. He went to the Turk Street address. He found a huge frame mansion of the 'eighties converted into cheap lodgings. The landlady, wearing large jet and gold ornaments, eyed him suspiciously. Miss Molineaux no longer lived there. Her present address? She had left none. Thus dismissed, he turned his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... days as a writer Hearn had conceived an ideal of his art as specific as it was ambitious. Early in the eighties he wrote from New Orleans in an unpublished letter to the Rev. Wayland D. Ball of Washington: "The lovers of antique loveliness are proving to me the future possibilities of a long cherished dream,—the English realization of a Latin style, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn

... on that night a chocolate-brown Liberty costume of a Burne Jones pattern. Miss Kent was only twenty-two, and wore rose-color, but the design of her dress was her mother's own. Kent wore an eighties collar with old-oak plaid and a red tie, I ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... atrocities that were committed by the Indians, white men were afraid to go into that country to settle. Even as late as in the early eighties when that prince of rascals, the wily Geronimo, made his bloody raids through southern Arizona, the men who did venture in and located ranch and mining claims, lived in daily peril of their lives which, in not a few instances, were paid as ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India. Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National Congress, which they had founded twenty years before, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... to the curious reader the facts of a case which caused so much commotion in distinguished bosoms of the late "eighties," I think I should say that, while I have a strong conviction as to the identity of the person himself, I shall not express it. I accept the doctrine that there are some names not to be uttered. Similarly I shall neither defend nor extenuate; ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... seemed to Mrs. Fisher persistently unfortunate. Each time she opened her mouth she said something best left unsaid. Loose talk about husbands had never in Mrs. Fisher's circle been encouraged. In the 'eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim



Words linked to "Eighties" :   eld, mid-eighties, old age, geezerhood, decade, age, years, decennary, 1880s, decennium, time of life



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