3 ms·
For 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 tw
by toasterlovin 7y ago
For 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