5 ms·
biweekly et al - every other week - twice a week
by daxfohl 7y ago
biweekly et al
- every other week
- twice a week
- numlocked 7y agoSemiweekly is twice a week
- daxfohl 7y agoSo is biweekly.
- dspillett 7y agoI've heard Americans use biweekly to mean every two weeks. I've also seen them use it to mean twice a week, but more rarely than the other meaning. In the UK and other English speaking areas (Australia and New Zealand to name two) bi-weekely always means twice a week, following the same pattern as biannually and other examples. We use fortnightly to mean every two weeks, but the word fortnight is not commonly used in the US. Bimonthly is also ambiguous unfortunately. Again in the UK it would be taken as meaning twice per month (almost, but not quite, the same as fortnightly) but some others use it to mean every two months. Biannually seems to be consistently used and understood to mean twice per year, with biennial meaning every two years though that isn't a commonly used word in my experience (people tend to just say "every two years").
- jhbadger 7y agoOne (relatively) common usage of biennial (or its Italian spelling biennale) is in the art and cinema community as competitions tend to happen every other year and are called a biennale even in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennale
- jessaustin 7y agoYou mean to say "semiannually", of course. As I've been told by many people for whom English is a second language, no one speaks English worse than the English. b^)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- theandrewbailey 7y agoBi- means two, so biweekly is every two weeks. Twice a week would be semiweekly (every half week), right?
- daxfohl 7y agoSemiweekly is explicit. Biweekly is ambiguous. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/on-biweekly-and-bimonthly https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/on-biweekly-an... Biweekly and bimonthly can mean the same thing because of the prefix bi-, which here can mean “occurring every two” or “occurring twice in.”
- jessaustin 7y agoThe idiom is damaged by careless use. It reminds me of some friends who insist that "penultimate" means "ultimate"...
- daxfohl 7y agoI don't think it is carelessness in this case. The prefix bi can have both meanings and ultimately it comes down to indeterminate parsing: (biweek)ly or bi(weekly), and thus can only be resolved by convention. But both usages have been long established (at least in the US) so we're stuck. This seems far different from the penultimate or literally or hysterical misuses that became a careless norm. Semiweekly suffers from the same logical discrepancy, but unlike biweekly the convention is well established (though you hardly ever hear the term in the US. In fact before this thread I wouldn't have known which it meant. (other than definitely being the opposite of biweekly... so...))