How to Use eighty-six in a Sentence

eighty-six

verb
  • Dick Smothers, who is eighty-six, took the long view the other day.
    — Bruce Handy, New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2025
  • Markey would be eighty years old if re-elected and eighty-six at the end of his third term in 2026.
    — Peter Lucas, Boston Herald, 20 Oct. 2025
  • Coe died last week, at the age of eighty-six, leaving behind a vast and varied discography.
    — Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker, 8 May 2026
  • The Mesozoic era lasted some hundred and eighty-six million years.
    — Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 8 May 2026
  • The designer, who is eighty-six, looked a bit like a ship captain, in a navy blazer embellished with gold buttons.
    — Rachel Syme, New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2025
  • In 2022, the painting sold at auction for eighty-six million dollars, a record price for the artist.
    — Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, 8 Sep. 2025
  • The deal would value OpenAI at eighty-six billion dollars and allow many employees to cash out millions in equity.
    — Ronan Farrow, New Yorker, 6 Apr. 2026
  • In one case, the daughter of a deceased follower recovered four hundred thousand dollars despite the fact that her mother had signed a pledge, at the age of eighty-six, promising not to seek a refund of her donations.
    — E. Tammy Kim, New Yorker, 26 Jan. 2026
  • Now eighty-six, Eggleston—who was born and lives in Memphis—has a distinctly Southern sense of humor that draws on observation, gossip, and a love of the absurd.
    — Hilton Als, New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2026
  • The fire had ripped through the park, a hundred-and-eighty-six-acre parcel in the Santa Monica Mountains where Rogers lived until his death, in a plane crash, in 1935.
    — Dana Goodyear, New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2025
  • The current leader of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six.
    — David Remnick, New Yorker, 11 Jan. 2026
  • On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy report from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal.
    — Bill McKibben, New Yorker, 3 Sep. 2025
  • This precise atomic state provides alternative structural data for an element that has historically resisted complete physical classification since its initial synthesis eighty-six years ago.
    — Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 7 June 2026
  • Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is regarded as even more of a hard-liner than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated, at eighty-six, by Israeli Air Force strikes.
    — Ruth Margalit, New Yorker, 19 June 2026
  • Last year, at the age of eighty-six, Hopkins appeared as the Roman emperor Vespasian on TV, in Those About to Die, the thrust of his performance being to treat the show’s title with scorn.
    — Literary Hub, 6 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'eighty-six.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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