nineties

noun

1. (form-of, plural, plural-only)plural of ninety
2. (plural, plural-only)The decade of one's life from age 90 through age 99.
3. (plural, plural-only)The range between 90 and 99.

   “My ideal bracket of temperature ranges from the sixties up to the nineties.”

4. The decade of the 1890s, 1990s, etc.

   “1919, Harry Hamilton Johnston, The Gay-Dombeys: A Novel, Macmillan, page 172, He and his clever staff of minor blackguards exploited to the full every weakness and caries in the London Society of the 'eighties, 'nineties, and 'oughts.”

   “The line was doubled in the nineties and Hillfoot station added for suburbanites in 1900.”

   “While PSB [public service broadcasting] has always been subject to multiple influences there is no question that the nineties was a period of massive structural transformation.”

adj

1. (not-comparable)From or evoking the 91st through 100th years of a century (chiefly the 1990s).

   “I found myself attracted to his mullet even though it struck me as needlessly nineties.”

   “Nineties kids are honestly "fired up" about their environment. Students are aware and worried that their world is being destroyed, and teachers only need to tap into that hidden stream of interest.”

name

1. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of nineties, in the context of a specific decade (almost always) the 1890s or 1990s.

   “Seventies UFO fans also referred to “close encounters,” including the consciousness-raising “close encounter of the third kind,” in which humans and aliens meet. But UFOlogy has gone through a radical change, and in the Nineties the terms of the past are largely obsolete. During the past decade, for instance, literally thousands of people have come forward to say they’ve been kidnapped, or “abducted,” by short, large-headed, thin-lipped entities with saucer eyes.”

   “Failure became a buzz word when the dotcom bubble burst in the late Nineties. Many paper millionaires instantly became part of the "90 per cent club" (people who had lost 90 per cent of their wealth, or more). The casualties got together and "dot-commiserated".”

   “The house will be transformed—it will be the Eighties. Not the real Eighties but the Naughties version (Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, Naughties) where pink and black come in organic cotton as opposed to stretch polyester.”

   “For thirty-six years the Lost Property office was managed by Maureen Beaumont, and when I went there to interview her, back in the late Nineties, she told me people didn't seem embarrassed about what they'd lost. She'd known men collect stashes of porn, or blow-up dolls.”

   “Author of The Rise of the Creative Class and many other tomes along similar themes, since his self-described conversion in the late Nineties, he [Richard Florida] has preached to all who will listen his doctrine of creative progress, and the necessity to ‘creatify’ even our most lowly service jobs.”