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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



... the 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 by John Francis Maguire, who wrote in 1868 The Irish in America. It is doubtful whether ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... gentleman of the highest character, was no doubt anxious to make the most possible out of his venture, did not duly appreciate that the word "Realistic," which was blazoned on the covers of the various books issued by him, was in the early eighties invariably interpreted as meaning pornographic. Presumably nothing was further from Mr. Vizetelly's wish—his defence at the trial was that the books were literature of the highest kind—but it is unquestionable that the format was such as to give the impression indicated, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... remarks 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 of in the ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... Peter cordially, as he recognized Vernon Haye. "So you haven't marked time in coming to see me. This is young Trefusis, I presume? Glad to meet you. Knew your father very well back in the 'eighties. Hope to renew the acquaintance soon, you know. If it ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman

... when the first generation of children born in California will reach maturity in the 'eighties; only when the tide of carefully planned migration from North and South, after the war, reaches the West, that life becomes regular. Only when the railways make the new State a world's thoroughfare, and the slavery stain is washed from our flag, that ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary while on despatch duty one winter's night in the early eighties has been sent us by one of the men concerned, and provides interesting reading. It was a fine moonlight night, with a touch of frost in the air, when these two men set out to march the five miles to the next barrack. ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour

... In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of his experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... a mile away on the right. The pick, shovel and flag were 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 of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... systematic application of scientific psychology to education and law and industry and social life and medicine is almost at its beginning. While the height of the last realistic wave was in the period of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, of the last century, its last phase, the practical application of physiological psychology, including psychotherapy, is only ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... as a careful investigator. Professor Charles Richet of the University of Paris spoke of him in the highest terms, and regarded him as "an exceptionally careful and cautious investigator." His book, Mental Suggestion, which was published early in the eighties, is considered an authority, and his general erudition and scientific attainments no one could question. For many years he was professor in the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... to the religious cult before mentioned in the event of Virginia's marriage or death. Either way considered, it was a rather dubious heritage. But it served to purchase Leslie Manor and the school became a fait accompli. This was in the early eighties and from its opening day the school had flourished. Perhaps this was due to New England energy and culture, or possibly some credit rested with Mrs. Bonnell, the matron, and real head of the house; a sweet lovable, gracious Southern gentlewoman whose own family and fortunes ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... Queen's golden Kyoung; it was erected by Thebaw's queen, Supayalat, in the early eighties—and now king Thebaw and his queen are in ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... well-adapted for materialistic purposes, this denial was proclaimed with the sound of trumpet throughout the land, and repeated again and again with surprising tenacity, with the result that even thoughtful investigators rejected vital force almost universally in the seventies and eighties. ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... 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 ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... years as eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest. In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its population into the ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... 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 now advanced the theory that in skirting the Gulf of Mexico on ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... the synthesis of numerous States—by the development of "Imperialisms" in the place of national policies, and by the search for a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions and linguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like are such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency of progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition which ignored "race," and the aim of the expansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the world, to extend the franchise ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... in the late eighties that Julia Ward Howe visited her sister near the city, and I very gladly was of service in helping her fill some of her engagements. She gave much pleasure by lectures and talks and enjoyed visiting some of our attractions. She was charmed with the Broadway ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... Spanish fleet that was to conquer both Holland and England, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth had succeeded Catholic "Bloody Mary" was an old one. For years the sailors of the waterfront had talked about it. In the eighties of the sixteenth century, the rumour took a definite shape. According to pilots who had been in Lisbon, all the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building ships. And in the southern Netherlands (in Belgium) the Duke of Parma was collecting ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

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

... old days—say from the mid-eighties—professing Christian men, when expostulated with as to the difference between their professed creed of the Sunday, and their daily practice in business, would say, 'oh, bosh! religion is one thing, business is another!' Then, as the years moved ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... always as readily disposed of. It is a long and dreary story of the inevitable struggles with ways and means which so often marks the life of pioneer undertakings. For years these Chancery suits hung like chains about the company's neck, and even into the eighties the directors were never free from sudden embarrassments and never knew from what ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... and spent a great many years fighting France's colonial wars. He served in the Formosa campaign of 1885; constructed a chain of forts at Tonkin, Cochin-China; was decorated for distinguished bravery in leading his troops in action there in the eighties; was Chief Engineer of the Engineering Corps at Hanoi, and undertook the building of a railroad from Senegal to the Niger River ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... the 'eighties took himself much less seriously than his successor of today. The eternal drill and the occasional manoeuvres were conducted on well-worn and almost automatic principles. As a result, the younger officers found hunting and polo decidedly better sport. Few or none of them were military enthusiasts; ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... songs, which were, of course, quite out of date, and mostly of the highly sentimental order which found favour in the early eighties, Philippa's eye was arrested by some words which seemed to her familiar. They were the ones Francis had quoted at their first meeting. He had spoken of a song Phil had been in the habit of singing, which seemed ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... 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, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... often allowed to cast a shadow in Mark Twain's home. The beautiful house in Hartford was a place of welcome and merriment, of many guests and of happy children. Especially of happy children: during these years—the latter half of the 'eighties—when Mark Twain's fortunes were on the decline, his children were at the age to have a good time, and certainly they had it. The dramatic stage which had been first set up at George Warner's for the Christmas ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... 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 ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... complacent satisfaction that by thus neutralizing a land which had for centuries been the cockpit of Europe, the Powers had laid the foundations of permanent peace. But the bond of international morality was loosened during the next half-century, and in the eighties even English newspapers argued in favour of a German right-of-way through Belgium for the purposes of war with France. It does not appear that the treaty was ever regarded as a serious obstacle by the German military ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... charge of the province seem to have remained only about two years each. Saldero was the last one. Early in the eighties of the nineteenth century the comandante took his command to Barlig, a day east of Bontoc, to punish that town because it had killed people in Tulubin and Samoki; Barlig all but exterminated the command — only three men escaped to tell the tale. Mandicota, a Spanish officer, went from Manila ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... chief centres of Anarchist thought and propaganda. They refrained from any participation in parliamentary politics, and always kept in close contact with the Labour organizations. However, in the second half of the 'eighties and the early 'nineties of the 19th century, when the influence of the Anarchists began to be felt in strikes, in the 1st of May demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours' day, and in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... been divided between her desire for the dramatic importance of appearing in the fairly good part of the Mother of the Bride, and a natural, but more frivolous wish to recall to the memory of so distinguished a company her success as a professional beauty of the 'eighties, a success that clung to her with the faded poetical perfume of pot-pourri, ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... consequence of what one may call the eighteenth-century glut—the Georgian society and 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

... 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, confidence, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... course, was not sudden. It was not accomplished in a year, nor in a decade. It was going on throughout the first half of Elizabeth's reign. By the beginning of the eighties the church control was disappearing. After 1585 the state had practically ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... vessels looked out of date and old-fashioned. Some veterans of the 'eighties or 'nineties, fit only to sail under a foreign flag according to pre-war standards, may have been dug out of their obscurity to play their part in the war. And a very important part it is. Ships must run, and, at a time when the Admiralty have levied a heavy toll for war purposes upon ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... honestly admired the tall blonde Irene, who had bloomed under the influences of matrimony into something suggestively English—high-colored, stately, emphatic. She liked the rambling ugly mansion built in the eighties after Hermann Paul's success with railroads, in the best mansard style of the day, and never touched since. The grounds which had been extensively planted by the railroad man were now covered with a luxuriant growth of exotic trees ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... from below. His plain aim in "The Antichrist" was to combat that menace by completing the work begun, on the one hand, by Darwin and the other evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand, by German historians and philologians. The net effect of this earlier attack, in the eighties, had been the collapse of Christian theology as a serious concern of educated men. The mob, it must be obvious, was very little shaken; even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essential Christian doctrines. But the intelligentsia, by 1885, had been ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... birthplace—for no Californian assumes that his neighbor is born in the State—Condy was wont to reply that he was "bawn 'n' rais'" in Chicago; "but," he always added, "I couldn't help that, you know." His people had come West in the early eighties, just in time to bury the father in alien soil. Condy was an only child. He was educated at the State University, had a finishing year at Yale, and a few months after his return home was taken on the staff of the San Francisco ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... there is none more popular than the Worcester Pearmain, first grown in the early eighties by Messrs. R. Smith and Co., of Worcester, and said to be a cross between King of the Pippins and the old Quarrenden (nearly always called Quarantine). It is a most attractive fruit—brilliant in colour, medium size, with pleasant brisk flavour—and ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... You go away, Fiers. I'll undress myself. Well, children, bye-bye...! I'll give you the details to-morrow, but let's go to bed now. [Kisses ANYA and VARYA] I'm a man of the eighties.... People don't praise those years much, but I can still say that I've suffered for my beliefs. The peasants don't love me for nothing, I assure you. We've got to learn to know the peasants! We ought ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... her father. Mr. Chesman and he were interested together in New Mexican mining claims in the eighties; I believe they made ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one cannot help wondering how he would have planned A Doll's House had he written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have heightened by contrast the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... Bramwell Booth, working behind the scenes and pulling all the strings, who edged his father away from concluding an alliance with the Church of England in the early eighties. Archbishop Benson was anxious to conclude that alliance, on terms. The terms did not seem altogether onerous to the old General, who was rather fond of meeting dignitaries. But Mr. Bramwell Booth would hear of no concession which weakened ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... movement in England was continually weakened by the necessity of keeping Ireland down. That necessity largely broke the strength of the great reform movement of the thirties. It destroyed Sir Robert Peel's Government in the forties. It broke down the strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government in the eighties. Ireland and Irish affairs absorbed so much of the time of the British Parliament that the affairs of Great Britain herself were neglected. The old free and easy ways of the British Parliament were brought to a summary close by the obstruction of the Irish Party in the eighties, and the modern rules ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender

... short, fat or lean, are related to the activity of a gland of internal secretion in the head, the pituitary, which became a centre of interest in the late eighties. Because of its situation, the opinion of the ancients was that it was the source of the mucus of the nose, an opinion reinforced by the greatest anatomist of the Dark Ages, Galen, and held up to the seventeenth century. In other words, it was considered simply a gland of external secretion. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... Early in the eighties he bought a country place at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and on the top of a hill he built a spacious house. There was a legend that in old times Indian Chiefs used to gather there to hold their powwows; at any rate, the name, the Sagamores' Hill, survived them, and this shortened ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... success, 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 ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... story current in the Midlands, a house in Birmingham, near the Roman Catholic Cathedral, was once very badly haunted. A family who took up their abode in it in the 'eighties complained of hearing all sorts of uncanny sounds—such as screams and sighs—coming from a room behind the kitchen. On one occasion the tenant's wife, on entering the sitting-room, was almost startled out of her senses at seeing, standing ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy. Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement. But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern—everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, the intuition of the contemporary, of this ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... pure and dry and in the hot months the breezes which blow almost continuously from the snow-capped heights of Pike's Peak, make the air deliciously cool, with a temperature rarely rising above the eighties. For this reason Denver is almost as popular a summer resort with those who live in the Middle West, as Colorado Springs, Manitou, and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... Hamilton sale—sold, I grieve to say, to be demolished for its paintings. But all vertical harpsichords were horizontal ones, put on end on a frame; and the book-case upright grand pianos, which, from the eighties, were made right into the present century, were horizontal grands similarly elevated. The real inventor of the upright piano, in its modern and useful form, was that remarkable Englishman, John Isaac Hawkins, the inventor of ever-pointed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various

... shanty. Aboard the steamer there were practically no sails to be manipulated; the donkey-engine and steam winch supplanted the hand-worked windlass and capstan. By the end of the seventies steam had driven the sailing ship from the seas. A number of sailing vessels lingered on through the eighties, but they retained little of the corporate pride and splendour that was once theirs. The old spirit ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry

... 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 enormous efficacy in his day. That is a claim on ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... critical moment Cleveland gave place to Harrison, and Bayard was succeeded by James G. Blaine, the most interesting figure in our diplomatic activities of the eighties. These years marked the lowest point in the whole history of our relations with other countries, both in the character of our agents and in the nature of the public opinion to which they appealed. Blaine was undoubtedly the most ill-informed of our great diplomats; yet a trace ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... increase in hop-production during the early 'eighties, the romance of hop-picking, on many farms, gave place to a picturesque but undesirable invasion of vagabondage from the large cities. Some farmers continued to choose their pickers from among the better sort of young men and maidens ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... came under discussion. Ought Margaret to know what Helen knew the Basts to know? Similar questions had vexed him from infancy, and at Oxford he had learned to say that the importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists. The epigram, with its faint whiff of the eighties, meant nothing. But he might have let it off now if his sister had not ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... lossen my job back i' t' eighties, An were laikin' for well-nigh two year, Who said that an out-o'-wark fettler Were ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman



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



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