What 100 years mean

Malaysia Day celebration at Stadium Merdeka on Sept 16, 1963. A centenarian would have witnessed this, among others. — National Archive Malaysia

THE number 100 has been in the news lately. It’s a good round number with many connotations and people have many different ways of interpreting it.

A 100-year-old person is called a centenarian, though some people have also called this 100-year-old a centurion, which means “the commander of a century (a group of one hundred) in the ancient Roman army”. Such a person may be old but not quite that old.