thirty-eight

noun

thir·​ty-eight ˌthər-tē-ˈāt How to pronounce thirty-eight (audio)
1
: a number that is one more than 37 see Table of Numbers
2
: a .38 caliber handgun
usually written .38
thirty-eight adjective
thirty-eight pronoun, plural in construction

Examples of thirty-eight in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
And for this he was assassinated, at the age of thirty-eight, in Africa in 1896. Literary Hub, 17 Feb. 2026 The melter sits over a sewer line, idling while heating the snow to thirty-eight degrees, barely above freezing, and drips the water directly into a drain. Naaman Zhou, New Yorker, 3 Feb. 2026 What worked at age eight can quietly guide behavior at age thirty-eight. Mark Travers, Forbes.com, 2 Jan. 2026 But in thirty-eight years there has only ever been one SPACEBALLS. Natalie Oganesyan, Deadline, 20 Dec. 2025 Over eight thousand Taco Bells and thirty-eight hundred Chipotles have institutionalized homogenized versions of Tex-Mex/Mexican cuisine across the US and elsewhere. JSTOR Daily, 26 Nov. 2025 Maguire had created, as the author himself described it, a dense, almost nineteenth-century-type novel that takes place over thirty-eight years and has thirty-eight speaking parts. CBS News, 16 Nov. 2025 Megan Reed, a smiley thirty-eight-year-old public-affairs manager for Bell, told me that the MV-75 was slated to replace the oldfangled Black Hawk, which entered service in 1979. Seth Harp, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1541, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Time Traveler
The first known use of thirty-eight was circa 1541

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Cite this Entry

“Thirty-eight.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thirty-eight. Accessed 22 Feb. 2026.

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