sixties

1. 1
   nounplural

   Alternative letter-case form of Sixties.

   Protest songs from the sixties still get played at rallies today.

   She wrote a memoir about coming of age during the sixties.

   Note

   A lowercase spelling that can name any century's decade, not only the one most readers hear by default. R. Marchant, writing in Railway Magazine in 1954, uses the sixties for the 1860s and adds the century in brackets. That is a useful habit when context could mislead, because without a cue the 1960s is assumed. In American use the word can also stand for that decade's counterculture rather than its calendar years.

2. 2
   nounplural

   The decade of a person's life spanning ages 60 through 69.

   By his late sixties he had finally retired from the family business.

   Many runners in their sixties still complete marathons each year.

3. 3
   nounplural

   The range of temperatures between 60 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

   Forecasters expect daytime highs in the sixties through the weekend.

   The greenhouse stays comfortably in the sixties even on cool mornings.

   Note

   Forecasters count temperature in bands of ten, and this band is read on the Fahrenheit scale, roughly 15.6 to 20.6 degrees Celsius. It usually attaches to highs, lows and readings rather than to the weather itself, and it is narrowed with mid, as in highs in the mid sixties. A reader used to Celsius should translate it before deciding what to wear.

4. 4
   adjective

   From or calling to mind a century's years numbered 61 through 70, chiefly the 1960s.

   The director gave the film a deliberately sixties look, all bold patterns and bright color.

   They decorated the lounge in a relaxed sixties style.

   Note

   The decade turned into a modifier that sits before a noun: sixties weed, sixties culture, sixties style. It is not comparable. Unlike the decade itself, it takes no article of its own. Arthur Marwick, writing in 1993, calls a set of novels fragments of sixties culture, a typical historian's use in which the word means the 1960s without any further marking.

5. 5
   noun

   Plural of sixty.

   Temperatures stayed in the low sixties all week.

   Both of my grandparents are now in their sixties.

   Note

   The plain count of the number sixty, and also of a broadcaster's sixty: a commercial lasting sixty seconds, so two sixties can mean two one-minute spots. The same spelling carries the decade of one's life and the decade of a century. Here the word counts separate things. There it names a single span of years.

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