5 ms·
God I hate the word bi-weekly; if you hadn't specified 14 days I would've thought it was twice a week. "bi-weekly" is never the right word to use because you al
by Smithalicious 7y ago
God I hate the word bi-weekly; if you hadn't specified 14 days I would've thought it was twice a week. "bi-weekly" is never the right word to use because you always have to add additional information that makes it redundant.
- toasterlovin 7y agoFor some reason the bi-weekly vs. semi-weekly thing doesn't confuse me, but I take your point and the dictionary seems to agree that it can mean either every two weeks or twice a week.
- Smithalicious 7y agoIt confuses me because I regularly hear "bi-weekly" to mean "twice per week". I don't think I've ever heard someone say semi-weekly. Usually you can make a good guess of the intended meaning from context, but the two time intervals are similar enough that it's frequently ambiguous.
- hunter2_ 7y agoInteresting... in my area (NYC) I only hear people say it to mean 14 days. I suppose the rationale is to think of "bi" as "two" (precisely as you'd do for bicycle, bisexual, binomial, etc.) rather than as "twice" and then the ambiguity disappears. Counterexample supporting ambiguity: the word bisect, which means two sections, but can quite easily also be thought of as halving!
- toasterlovin 7y agoI guess I’m just generalizing semi-weekly from semi-annual. Do people actual my use the term bi-weekly to mean twice a week? I understand confusing bi-annual to mean twice a year because years can be evenly split in two and bi-annual would thus mean every six months. But weeks, being 7 days long, don’t naturally get cut in half. If you heard someone use the phrase bi-weekly and the context implied twice a week, what would that even mean to you? It seems to me that someone would always say the exact days of the week they meant.
- lonelappde 7y agoA lot of people dictionary words incorrectly and the dictionary unfortunately adapts and decays the language into incomprehensibility. That doesn't make correct usage wrong.
- diN0bot 7y agofort-weekly
- OJFord 7y agoBiweekly is twice per week just like biannually is twice per anum. Fortnightly and biennially are 'every other'.
- p1necone 7y agoThe fact that the parent comment used Biweekly to mean 14 days seems to suggest that it's not unambiguous.
- ghaff 7y agoIt’s ambiguous if people misunderstand you even if they’re “wrong” for being confused. Avoid those terms. People will widely misinterpret them.
- toasterlovin 7y agoA bicycle is not half a wheel, it is two wheels. If bi-annual is twice a year, then why does the word semi-annual exist? And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
- benj111 7y ago"why does the word semi-annual exist" Your parent already provided the counterpoint, Biennially. Additionally I'm not convinced by your bicycle => 2 => bi annual logic. You could equally argue it leads to 2 times a year, because it doesn't happen a half every year just like a bike doesn't have half a wheel.
- toasterlovin 7y agoMostly I'm just arguing that it's ambiguous. I don't have a strong opinion, but the person I was responding to did and it seems like a silly thing to be so adamant about.
- OJFord 7y ago
- aserafini 7y agoFortnightly is how I would express every 14 days.
- toasterlovin 7y agoAmericans don't generally use that word.
- Smithalicious 7y agoHeh, I just realized that this means that biweekly (once per two weeks) is about the same as bimonthly (twice per month)