How to Use twenty-one in a Sentence

twenty-one

noun
  • While leaving the event, he was stabbed twenty-one times.
    — Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker, 4 Aug. 2025
  • The kid’s only twenty-one years old.
    — Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2026
  • Now there were twenty-one hours till the train would pull into the station.
    — Lauren Collins, New Yorker, 8 June 2026
  • With babies, there’s a good chance of their speaking by twenty-one.
    — Sloane Crosley, The New Yorker, 5 Aug. 2024
  • So Ice was out there with at least twenty, twenty-one guys, all on that one bus.
    — Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, 23 Mar. 2025
  • The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa.
    — Rivka Galchen, New Yorker, 21 Sep. 2025
  • My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab.
    — Rivka Galchen, New Yorker, 21 Sep. 2025
  • After twenty-one months in solitary, he was transferred to a standard cell.
    — James Verini, New Yorker, 2 Mar. 2026
  • So far, four boats have been destroyed, resulting in the deaths of twenty-one people.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker, 13 Oct. 2025
  • Inkjet print on white plexiglass; seven-and-a-half inches by twenty-one feet.
    — Kerry James Marshall, The New Yorker, 20 Nov. 2023
  • Riki had worked at the nursing home for almost two and a half years, from age twenty-one to twenty-three.
    — Literary Hub, 10 Sep. 2025
  • Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.
    — Alex Abramovich, New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2025
  • By the age twenty-one, 20% of autistic youths will have had a police encounter.
    — Catherine Tan, TIME, 20 Dec. 2024
  • Out of the twenty-one of us, seventeen had never once been on a fire assignment.
    — River Selby august 25, Literary Hub, 25 Aug. 2025
  • All of us were white, and all of us in our thirties or forties except for Gavin, who was twenty-one.
    — Sierra Crane Murdoch, Harper's Magazine, 3 May 2023
  • Oh’s center raised twenty-one million dollars for its launch, which her hospital matched.
    — Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 17 July 2023
  • Clans often use members who are under twenty-one to commit more overt crimes so that they will be tried in more lenient youth courts.
    — Hazlitt, 1 Mar. 2023
  • Stein’s name is engraved on the stone’s front face, and Toklas, who died twenty-one years after her partner, on the back.
    — Hannah Whitaker, The New Yorker, 22 Apr. 2024
  • The supply is capped at twenty-one million coins, with issuance predetermined by code.
    — Becca Bratcher, Forbes.com, 26 Aug. 2025
  • An obstetrician, for example, can be sued for birth trauma until a child is twenty-one years old.
    — Meredith Broussard, WIRED, 15 Mar. 2023
  • The film was so controversial that it was banned in over four dozen countries and spawned a series of sequels over the course of twenty-one years.
    — Jasmine Washington, Seventeen, 17 Mar. 2023
  • The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open.
    — Rivka Galchen, New Yorker, 21 Sep. 2025
  • My Big Fat Greek Wedding has brought audiences joy for twenty-one years.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 27 Apr. 2023
  • At twenty-one, Marshall quit college to work at Chess, as his father’s heir apparent.
    — John Seabrook, The New Yorker, 11 Sep. 2023
  • One hundred twenty-one of the 594 athletes on the American team — more than one in five — are from the state.
    — Kevin Baxter, Los Angeles Times, 10 Aug. 2024
  • When Akbar was twenty-one, he was installed as its general manager.
    — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2024
  • The actor and producer Nicole Stéphane spent twenty-one years trying to find a director to take him on.
    — Christine Smallwood, The New York Review of Books, 18 Jan. 2024
  • Paul had been twenty-one at the time, in her final year at the Slade School of Art, using her bedroom as a studio.
    — Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2025
  • Frankenthaler, twenty-one years old, cold-calls Clement Greenberg and invites him to an exhibition.
    — Zachary Fine, New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2025
  • And, the hotel has expanded underground, extending one-hundred and twenty-one feet deep below ground.
    — Allyson Portee, Forbes, 2 May 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'twenty-one.' 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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