Word.ws English Dictionary

nine to fives

nine to fives is the plural of nine to five.

nine to fives is the third-person singular simple present indicative of nine to five.

Meaning of nine to five

Noun

nine to five (plural nine to fives)

  1. A typical day job that occupies these working hours; (also) the working day itself.
    • He done quit his nine to five, he drink full-time / And now he’s living in a bottle1974, Gil Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson, “The Bottle”, in Winter in America
  2. (often) The routine imposed by such a work schedule.
    • Going back to the nine to five after the weekend can be depressing.
  3. (broadly) A person who works such a day job.
    • Stock markets crash, businesses go bankrupt, and 9-to-5s can disappear from layoffs and downsizing.2009, Scott Brown, Treat Your Poker Like a Business, page 101
    Synonyms:
    nine-to-fiver

See all 7 meanings of nine to five

Questions about nine to fives

What is nine to fives the plural of?
Nine to fives is the plural of nine to five.

Words near nine to fives in the dictionary

  1. nine points circles
  2. nine thousand
  3. nine times out of ten
  4. nine to five
  5. nine to fived
  6. nine to fives
  7. nine to fiving
  8. nine ways to Sunday
  9. nine while five
  10. nine you're fine, ten you're mine
  11. nine-ball

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nine to fives (page history and authors); nine to five (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “nine to fives.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nine_to_fives. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.