years
noun
Form of year , plural of year.
Simple meaning
A very long time.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
yirzIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈjɪɹz
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
colloquialhyperbolic
A very long time.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A1 · Beginner
- Frequency
- Very Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: (colloquial, hyperbolic) A very long time.
Used this way, years is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in everyday conversation and social media or informal writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Casual
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Playful
- Usage feel
- Casual and conversational
Where it naturally appears
- Everyday conversation
- Social media/informal writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
A period of time containing 365 (or 366) days.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A reference book that is published regularly once every year.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
The time of life after retirement from active work.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: very long time
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.