Similar case in point: “bimonthly” means “twice a month.” That makes sense.
But the definition for “bi-weekly” does not make sense.
What do you think?
Fortnightly means every two weeks. Bi weekly means twice a week.
whats next? every third tuesday is called a pubg?
I’m wondering the same thing about Bible. Does it mean twice per Ble or every other Ble?
No. It means Ble likes both girls and boys.
https://www.attitude.co.uk/culture/film-tv/canadian-author-hilariously-points-out-every-depiction-of-noahs-ark-shows-two-male-lions-299134/ … or it stands for the two lions who like each other very much.
We should rename it bibi then
I know you’re making a joke, but on the off chance someone thinks you might be onto something: it’s from biblio, or book.
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Two bles.
The old and new testament together are two, thus “Bible”.
Before the new testament they just carried around a ble.
The real answer is to solve this by using different terms. For instance, “twice per week” or “every other week”.
Don’t try to get anyone to agree on a definition, it’s just begging for problems.
So if “bi” is twice, does that mean if you are ‘bi-sexual’, you only have sex twice?
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Bi-weekly means twice a week and every two weeks. Look it up in the dictionary of you choosing.
We should all agree it means twice a week. As we already have fortnightly to mean every two weeks.
But what about fourthnightly
Clearly, once every 4 nights
Compare semi-weekly.
I get those
Bi-semi weekly when I want to be absolutely emphatic that I mean a week.
It’s because of British English, and the fact that American English seems to have dropped a word which is caused confusion.
Bi-weekly means two times a week.
Fortnightly means every 2 weeks. But American English seems to have lost the word fortnightly, so there is this ambiguity now.
The banks use “biweekly” and “semiweekly” to avoid this exact kind of ambiguity. Biweekly would be twice a week, while semiweekly would be every other week.
It comes up in banking a lot because of payroll. If you get paid every other week, you get paid semiweekly. But if you get paid on the 1st and 15th of every month, you get paid bimonthly.
Canadian here, with 50 years in the workforce. I’ve never once been paid semi-weekly or bimonthly. Here, biweekly is every two weeks semi-monthly is every half month. Obviously, that latter is often spoken of as twice a month, which just adds to the confusion between “bi” and “semi”.
The reality is that these words, like most words (at least in English), mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and consensus can be hard to reach.
I give you the phrase “table the discussion”. Sometimes it means to formally bring something up for discussion. Other times it means setting the discussion aside for future consideration.
Or, my favourite from my childhood, “fat chance” which means that something is even less likely than if it had a slim chance. Granted, that might be more in the line of idiomatic slang, but it stands as part of at least the era’s Canadian English that did have broad consensus and still does, I think.
That seems backwards to me. Mainly because if you move it to years instead of weeks, something that happens twice a year happens in half a year (semiannual) while something that happens every other year happens in 2 years (biannual).
Of course, I guess you you argue that it isn’t much time for the thing to happen, but how many times it does happen. The shareholders meeting happens in January and July, so it happens twice in a year, and it should be semiannual. This is because it happens is semi-year, or 6 months. But you could argue that it happens twice in a year, so has bi-annually.
I realized I may have talked out of my original point, but I feel like my initial comment (semiannual is 6 months, and biannual is 24 months) is easier to understand.
Think of biweekly and biweekly as homonyms, they can mean either and you figure out the meaning through context.
Very few things happen twice a week, biweekly usually means every second week, but it’s never used because fortnightly is preferred.
Others here are saying bimonthly means twice a month but I’ve never heard it used that way. Again, very few things happen twice a month, it’s always fortnightly which is not the same. Lots of things happen every second month, “the board meets bimonthly”, that means 6 times a year.
Biannual always means twice a year because what things do you do every second year?
In all cases you can use the alternative meaning like “I visit my cousin biannually” and it’s not incorrect but of course “I visit my cousin every second year” avoids confusion.
Just to note, while fortnightly is used frequently in many countries, it is almost never used in the US, which I think is what contributes to the posters confusion (assuming they are from the US) .
The word for an occurrence of every two years or for a duration of two years is biennial. Plenty of events are biennial, such as festivals, exhibitions and conferences. The Olympics and Football World Cup are quadrennial.
Because biennial is a word that exists, that doesn’t mean biannual does not have the same meaning.
But if you took a moment to look it up, you’d see that it does have different meanings than “biennial”.
Good lord. I made a mistake. Fuck me.
Biannual does indeed have potentially different meanings to biennial. In that you are correct.
However, my point as I’m sure you are aware, is that the existence of the word “biennial” does not imply that “biannual” can not mean 2 years.
The most typical “biennial” event is the lifecycle of many plants.
Lots of people get paid twice a month
I’m a tax consultant. I look at what companies pay people all day every day. I’ve never seen a company pay twice monthly. Always fortnightly. This might vary by region but unheard of here.
In America this is ridiculously common. Many people are paid every two weeks, but many are paid twice a month. Very common.
Amazing.
There was often much confusion about this in the past because as you said it can mean multiple things. We seem to have gone away from any proper etymological use of the word ‘bi’ and have defined (for the most part) biweekly to be every two weeks, bimonthly to be twice a month, biannually to be twice a year (that one maybe not). Legal documents that I see don’t use those terms to avoid confusion.
Frustratingly, “biannual” can also mean twice a year or every two years. Fortunately there is the “biennial” which unambiguously means every two years.
Bicentennial is also every 50 years.
Are you sure about that? I’m from Canada and distinctly remember the travel ads urging us to head on down to participate in the bicentennial celebrations, meant to celebrate the second century of that country’s founding.
bicentennial
Well shit, I stand corrected.
Language is a wonderful chaos. You’re just on the leading edge of change! :)
One of the ‘trivia’ things on the display in our elevator was about how Websters had a listing for 5 years that wasn’t actually a word, ‘dord’. Like come on, now you can’t even trust words in the dictionary?!
we have bi like in binary(yes, no/ one week yes other no) and bi in like bisexual(atraction to 2 genders/ twice a week) i think the problem is more deep than the week
I’m bisexual, I’ve had sex twice.
And will never again
yeah, i think we have generally developed to distinct uses for the root word “bi” like, bisect means to cut in two. that’s where my head goes when i hear bi-weekly. a bisected week. to be honest, outside of describing periods of time and bi sexuals i can’t think of other times that “bi” means double an amount and not a split amount.
You mean like bicycle? where they cut bikes in half
i didn’t say there weren’t any or that I’m very smart 😅 I’ve thought of a few others since then too.
As a non-native English speaker, this is what I thought when I was first introduced to this word. I was even fighting it when I was told it meant “every two weeks”. Then I caved and went with the flow. You are the first person to ever agree with me. I’m not crazy. Thank you.
You might already know but English has the word ‘fortnight’, which also means every two weeks. In the UK, I’ve never heard ‘biweekly’, so you might find ‘fortnight’ easier to use.
I actually didn’t know that one, even though we were taught British English in my country. All I know is that annoying video game fortnite. Lol But now I know, thank you :)
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That’s actually very true.
It means both. Welcome to English.
No it doesn’t. Lots of people misuse it that way, but:
Bi = x2 and semi = /2
So biweekly = every two weeks and semiannually means twice a year.
This is misused quite a lot, but the meanings aren’t the same, they’re opposites.
but weekly × 2 is every 3.5 days and weekly ÷ 2 is every two weeks
Not necessarily. The definition allows biweekly to mean both, because bi- simply refers to their being 2, so it is defined as being “twice per” or “every two”. If it could only be used in the way you present then the word bifurcate would mean to replicate, as opposed to divide in two.
That being said, dictionaries will often note that semi- should be used to avoid confusion, and writing style guides, like Chicago, will state semi- needs to be used for instances where you mean twice a week.
We whinge and moan about the French language police, but a curator of a global English occasionally shows merit as an idea.
If it can encourage people to learn adverbs other than ‘literally’ and stop munging words - “that above revert emails ask was fire” - then I’m all for it. The less a sentence looks like it was in a car crash, the better.
Gosh I said something rude, realized a second later you’re probably French.
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this is TIL, for me. “fortnightly” almost always solves it.
I always think the rule was “bi-” for “two” like bicycles VS semicycles.
dictionary people say it is up to the sayer to avoid confusion.
“He T-posed fortnitely down the stairs.”
Doesn’t a fortnight mean 10 days or something, though?
10 days = tenday 14 nights = fourt’night = fortnight
I always thought it was 14 days… so pretty much 2 weeks.
Then again, I don’t go checking dictionaries as a hobby.
you might be correct in a way
I go checking dictionaries, and TIL it’s a shortening of the olde English version of fourteen night"!
Nah a fortnight is two weeks.
Nah
weekly is once a week. bi-weekly is weekly times 2
If you bisect something, you don’t double it.
So bisexual means half-sexual.
In your case, it’s a misspelling. Should be buysexual.
wait a minute, by that rationale, maybe bi-weekly means that it’s sexually attracted to two different types of weeks
