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Nineties   /nˈaɪntiz/   Listen
Nineties

noun
1.
The decade from 1890 to 1899.  Synonym: 1890s.
2.
The decade from 1990 to 1999.  Synonym: 1990s.
3.
The time of life between 90 and 100.  Synonym: mid-nineties.






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"Nineties" Quotes from Famous Books



... system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... sloping gardens above. The result is that, if you are a visitor at Clyffe, you have your own private bathing ground, your own private beach where the children may play, without fear of being encroached upon, unless, indeed, a boat should be run in among the rocks from seaward. In the early nineties of the last century, the only daughter of the house of Clyffe was engaged to be married to a young officer quartered at the military depot at Berwick. They were a blameless but not particularly interesting couple, and one of their hobbies was to ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... sure that all are fond of watermelon. Have the fruit on ice at least twenty-four hours before serving, and above all things give this affair when the temperature is up in the nineties if you want it fully appreciated. Have a sharp knife and cut the melons at the table (for it is such a decorative fruit), and use only white dishes and flowers. Let each guest count the seeds in the piece or pieces and give a souvenir to the one having the largest number. A pretty ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce

... with the tennis racket. She was generally called Kate Middleton, or some such plain, straightforward designation. She wore strong walking boots and leather leggings. She ate beef steak. She shot with a rifle. For a while this Boots and Beef Heroine (of the middle nineties) made a tremendous hit. She climbed crags in the Rockies. She threw steers in Colorado with a lariat. She came out strong in sea scenes and shipwrecks, and on sinking steamers, where she "cowed" the trembling stewards and "dogged" the mutinous sailors in the same fashion that Madeline used to ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... doomed never to know. Francis told her afterwards, with a certain marital brevity, that it was a combination of dry toast and thinking too much about French poets. His literary affiliations, which he earned his living by, had stopped short at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson, and the last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer

... opposite the Traders' National Bank during the decades of the eighties and nineties was a smart store front upon which was fastened a large, black and gold sign bearing the words "The Paris Millinery Company" and under these words in smaller letters, "Mrs. Brunhilde Herdicker, Prop." If Mr. George ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... in detail than "Lord and Lady Algy" or "Lady Huntworth's Experiment." In France, it might perhaps be compared to "La Famille Benoiton" or "Le Monde ou l'on s'ennuie," or better, perhaps, to a more recent, but now almost forgotten satire of the 'nineties, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell

... the form of a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail, the history of culture, and still more the history of art, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is quite incomprehensible. The great political revolution of the nineties could never have been a product of the rigid Pigtail age, but it could very well have been a result of the Rococo in the Pigtail. In the Rococo there was still life, mad, ungovernable life; the Pigtail always had a Hippocratic face. The virtuosos of personality, the strange Rococo ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... May in the early 'nineties, about six o'clock of the evening, old Jolyon Forsyte sat under the oak tree below the terrace of his house at Robin Hill. He was waiting for the midges to bite him, before abandoning the glory of the afternoon. His thin ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and sometimes ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow

... were before the House of the Blind Spot. It was a two storey drab affair, much like a thousand others, old- fashioned, and might have been built in the early nineties. It had been outside of the fire limits of 1906, and so had survived the great disaster. Chatterton Place is really a short street running lengthwise along the summit of the hill. A flight of stone steps descended to ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... in the department of Hautes Pyrenees on December 2, 1863, and spent most of his life in this region. He was educated at Pau and Bordeaux, and later spent a short time in a law office. Early in the nineties he wrote his first volumes, slender plaquettes with the brief title "Vers." It is interesting that one of these was dedicated to that strange English genius, Hubert Crackanthorpe, the author of "Wreckage" ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes

... 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 ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... out in force to hear, and our good, tried friends, Nathaniel and Armenia White, learning their intention in advance, opened the spacious Eagle Hall for their convenience, and that of the towns-people who wished to see and to hear. Warm as the evening was, the thermometer up in the nineties, the hall was packed, and great numbers went away that could not gain admittance. Rev. Mr. Blake, a Congregationalist minister of Concord, has done the cause good service by vilifying and abusing it, until he roused quite an interest. It was partly ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... the nation at large been less touching,—especially, perhaps, as regards the imperial order to acquire Western knowledge, to learn Western languages, to imitate Western ways. Only those who have lived in Japan during or before the early nineties are qualified to speak of the loyal eagerness that made self-destruction by over-study a common form of death,—the passionate obedience that impelled even children to ruin their health in the effort to master tasks too difficult for their little minds (tasks devised by well-meaning advisers ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... 1893. The Co-operative Movement is now drawing closer to politics, following the lead of most of the continental countries, notably Belgium and Germany. Though we cannot say that there is any indication of the State taking over the movement, we may note that the growth of municipal trading in the 'nineties was, in principle, an application of the consumers' association to monopolies of distribution such as ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... was so overwhelming and was given so much publicity that its influence extended to many smaller towns. In fact, the ten-hour system, which remained in vogue in this country in the skilled trades until the nineties, dates largely from this movement in the middle of ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... Ireland last summer as delegates of the Eighty Club included some who had not thoroughly explored that country since the early nineties. They were all agreed that a great change had taken place in the internal condition of Ireland. They noticed a great increase of self-confidence, of prosperity, of hope. Many who entered upon that tour with doubts as to the power of the Irish people to take up the burden of self-government came ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... six feet, but no doubt when she had figger instead of flesh she looked taller. Well, I've discovered no less than five tall handsome brunettes that sparkled here in the late Eighties and early Nineties, but it's the deuce and all to get an exact description out of anybody, especially when quite a few years have elapsed. Most people don't see details, only effects. That's what we detectives come up against all the time. So, whether these ladies were five feet eight, five feet ten, or six ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... nineties, when Quinny, Steingall, Herkimer, little Bennett, who afterward roamed down into the Transvaal and fell in with the Foreign Legion, Jacobus and Chatterton, the architects, were living through that fine, rebellious state of overweening ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... about six thousand a year. Father was quite well off when Sally and I married and Ballinger and Geary went to New York after marrying the Lyman girls, who were such belles out here when they paid us a visit in the nineties. They had money of their own and father gave the boys a hundred thousand each. He gave the same to Sally and me when we married. But when you came along, or rather when you were ten, and he died—well, he had run through nearly everything, and had lost his grip. Mother ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in sight and sheered over to the curb in ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... jail commitments for Baltimore, Charleston, and St. Louis have increased slowly since the seventies until the nineties, and now apparently ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes

... about something. If you see a fat man with about fifty-seven chins come out of that door there grab him, for that'll be Abe. He's one of those fellows who advertise each step up they take in the world by growing another chin. I'm told that way back in the nineties he only had two. If you do grab Abe, remember that he knows me as ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... for what might turn up, and feelin' equal to pullin' off any sort of a deal, from matchin' Piddie for the lunches to orderin' a new stock issue. What if the asphalt over on Fifth-ave. was softenin' up, with the mercury hittin' the nineties, and half the force off on vacations? I had a real job to attend to. I ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... are slaves should not be lacking, and with a family one could endure under the same roof. All this must needs be settled before I could call on my new neighbors. Time and patience accomplished everything, although the mercury was soaring aloft among the nineties all the time; and at last came the morning when I seated myself before the household I proposed to interview for the benefit of the readers of our day, who demand (say the newspaper authorities) facts and details of daily lives that were of ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... (not yet, however, a baronet). Scott was so impressed by his extraordinary vigour and shrewdness as to talk of a partnership, but Gladstone's existing arrangement in Liverpool was settled for fourteen years. Sometime in the nineties he was sent to America to purchase corn, with unlimited confidence from Sir Claude Scott. On his arrival, he found a severe scarcity and enormous prices. A large number of vessels had been chartered for the enterprise, and were on their way ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... middle eighties—none of us play much, being out in space most of the time, you know—sometimes, when my hook is going particularly well, I go up into the nineties." ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... the multitude throughout the whole people come!" Another sure indication of the prevalence of the vice of sodomy is to be found in Juvenal, Sat. ii, 12-13, "but your fundament is smooth and the swollen haemorrhoids are incised, the surgeon grinning the while," just as the physician of the nineties grinned when some young fool came to him with a blennorrhoeal infection! The ancient jest which accounts for the shaving of the priest's crown is an inferential substantiation of the fact that the evils of antiquity, like the legal codes, have descended through the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... the nineteenth century that modern short stories, novels and plays began to be written on anything like a scale worthy of note. The earliest of these were romantic in spirit, though most of them had a realistic tinge. With Realism, the short story came into its own in the eighties and nineties of the last century. This trend came like a fresh current to take its place side by side with Romanticism, without, however, ousting it from the literary scene. But owing to the realistic technique and the tragic endings of much in ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... rapidly this trade expanded during the decade of the 'nineties. The column headed bacon and hams indicates clearly enough that the imports of fresh meat did not displace those of preserved pig meat, for the latter expanded from 4,715,000 cwt. to 7,784,000 cwt. during the decade. The column ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... must take place on the spawning-beds. It must be noted that the salmon runs are in cycles. Every fourth year is a big run of sockeye, and when there is a small run of these fish there may be a big run of humpbacks or dog salmon. One year in the early nineties the Thompson presented a strange sight to travellers in the Canadian Pacific trains, though as the trains pass this part in the very early morning probably few saw it. The line here closely follows the river, and in the canyon rises to ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert

... tell' y', lad, that we was 'eaded for this point way back some'ers in the late nineties," said the engineer, "but there come a Nor'wester, an' the cap'in, 'e lost 'is 'ead and turned to run. We'd froze in for the winter, but we'd a seen things if we ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell

... nations in the manufacture of motor vehicles, and in the early nineties their products began to make occasional appearances on American roads. The type of American who owned this imported machine was the same that owned steam yachts and a box at the opera. Hardly any new development has aroused greater hostility. It not only frightened horses, ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha'n't quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it's the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I've tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... large collection of stories to be drawn upon, for besides those given in the two volumes mentioned, many of equal interest and value appeared in Borderland, a psychic quarterly edited and published by my Father for a period of four years in the nineties and ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead

... with tortuous, ill-paved streets, where the wayfarer looks instinctively for the "No-thoroughfare" board. There is one long straggling main street with fairly good shops and buildings, but beyond this Irkutsk remains much the same dull, dreary-looking place that I remember in the early nineties, before the railway had aroused the town from its slumber of centuries. Even now, the place is absolutely primitive and uncivilised, from an European point of view, and the yellow Chinese and beady-eyed Tartars who throng the business quarters ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... should be perpetual peace and plentiful prosperity. Yet we have hard times after hard times, and panic after panic. Why is this? If I could tell you why, it would repay for the time and money spent to hear this lecture. During the great panic in the nineties Mr. W.C. Whitney of New York, wrote a letter to a leading New York daily in which he said: "There are just two causes for this panic; too much silver and too much tariff." I do not disparage these two problems, but I do say Mr. Whitney had a very narrow view of a panic. ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... received per hour of work has slightly increased, though there are few working people who will count themselves very fortunate in a decrease of hours if it is paid for even in a part by a decrease of the real wages received at the end of the day. And even if we compare the early nineties with the last years of the recent decade, we find that the slight increase in the purchasing power of the total wages received (i.e. real wages) amounted at the most to no more than two or three per cent in these ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... American lieutenants, the cause of unashamedness appears to be winning its way in literature. The George Moore of these Confessions stands to view as a reckless and courageous pioneer, a bad strategist but a faithful soldier, in the foolhardy, disastrous and gallant Campaign of the Nineties. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... Rumanians, and of Serbians and other Balkan peoples. But not the emigrants, themselves, were the almost dominant type on the streets downtown. That type was the emigrant's prosperous offspring: descendant of the emigrations of the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, those great folk-journeyings in search not so directly of freedom and democracy as of more money for the same labour. A new Midlander—in fact, a new American—was beginning ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... the literature of the eighteen-nineties was given by Mr. Holbrook Jackson to the world, I looked eagerly in the index for SOAMES, ENOCH. I had feared he would not be there. He was not there. But everybody else was. Many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly, lived ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... more likely to be the case since, long before the decision of 1911, the Standard Oil Company had ceased to be a monopoly. In the early nineties there came to the front in the oil regions a man whose organizing ability and indomitable will suggested the Standard Oil leaders themselves. This man's soul burned with an intense hatred of the Rockefeller group, and this ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... intentionally taken from speeches, etc., published in the early nineties of the last century. If necessary, it would be an easy matter to fill several volumes of similar matter from the annual congress reports down to 1913; from the vast mass of German Social Democratic literature published between 1890 and 1914; and from the hundred party newspapers and reviews ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... touch with mankind, they cover the body but do not express the soul. With the vogue of the short coat, short skirt, slouch hat, and brown boots, style has gone out and ease come in; and with ease, it would seem, easy, not to say free-and-easy, manners. I speak not of the "nineties" when a young degenerate could ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... Bendix, Luchesi, Miss Hanchette and others played there. During those years Professor Blankart formed also, in connection with Miss Hanchette, the Beethoven Quartette club and gave for several seasons in succession public concerts. In the early nineties he left San Francisco for Oakland. He went about three times to Europe on business matters, but as usual discovered that it is better to stay with one's profession than to change, and eventually, after some time, came back to the fold and worked ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... Nearer to mediaeval notions of hell comes this fiery scene than anything imagined by Dante. The working life of one of these men is not over ten years, B—— says. A decade of this intense heat, compared to which a breath of outdoor air in the close mill-yard, with the midsummer sun in the nineties, seems chilly, wears a man out—"only fit for the boneyard then, sir," was the laconic estimate of an intelligent boss whom I questioned ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... our own—the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt deplore my indiscretion in being alive ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... earnestly discussed in many States to circumvent the further ingenuity of the boss. A further step towards the state control of parties was taken when laws began to busy themselves with the conduct of the campaign. Corrupt Practices Acts began to assume bulk in the early nineties, to limit the expenditure of candidates, and to enumerate the objects for which campaign committees might legitimately spend money. These are usually personal traveling expenses of the candidates, rental of rooms for committees and halls for meetings, ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... graduation in use in the secondary school, takes account mainly of the amount of work done.... The student who barely passes his work gets just the same amount of credit towards graduation as the one who passes high in the nineties. It is to be expected, then, that the student ... will reason something like this: I will be graduated if I pass my work in the seventies just the same as if I pass it in the nineties. What is the use of wasting time and effort in securing ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... she had heard, a sound from the nursery, and she was impatient to see if one of the children had awakened and got out of bed. All the evening, while she had changed the skin-tight sleeves of the eighties to the balloon ones of the nineties in an old waist which she had had before her marriage and had never worn because it was unbecoming, her thoughts had been of Harry, whom she had punished for some act of flagrant rebellion during the afternoon. Now she was eager ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... owned indeed that Francis Thompson was a puzzle to his contemporaries of the nineties. He paid the usual penalty of vaulting originality. The decade is famous for its bold experiments and shining successes in the art of poetry. One might expect that a public, grown accustomed to exquisitely wrought novelties ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson

... and the political differences of the parents were continued in their children. Only a very rare and selfless nature could have carried through so difficult a situation without lack of either dignity or sweetness. Lord Carlisle, in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, when I knew him best, showed no want of either. The restrictions he laid upon his own life were perhaps made natural by the fact that he was first and foremost an artist by training and temperament, and that the ordinary occupations, rural, social, or political, of the great land-owning noble, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the 'beau ideal of jeunesse doree,' a sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but already an editor—already publishing books! His stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own football captain; we knew his face as we ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... adjustment of the relations between the advanced and backward races of mankind is the greatest political task of our age; it is a responsibility shared jointly between all the civilised States, and when in the 'eighties and 'nineties the vast regions of Africa were partitioned amongst them, Germany, late in the field, asserted her claims and received her share ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... stage. He walked with a lissom jauntiness. His eye was bright. One or two of those whom he passed on his way had the idea that this fine-looking man was in pain. They fancied that he was moaning. But Uncle Chris was not moaning. He was humming a gay snatch from the lighter music of the 'nineties. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... lives with her daughter, in part of a double house, at 3461 Wilson Avenue, Campbell, Ohio. Their home is fairly well furnished and clean in appearance. Phoebe is of slender stature, and is quite active in spite of the fact that she is nearing her nineties. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... wireless came in slowly and spasmodically, and Jeffryes was becoming resigned to the eccentricities of the place. As an example of the unfavourable conditions which sometimes prevailed: on April 14 the wind was steady, in the nineties, with light drift and, at times, the aurora would illumine the north-west sky. Still, during "quiet" intervals, two messages came through ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson



Words linked to "Nineties" :   old age, decennium, decennary, decade, time of life, 1990s, age, years, eld, geezerhood



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