Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week."
from LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca on 14 Dec 2023 10:33
https://lemmy.world/post/9554256
from LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca on 14 Dec 2023 10:33
https://lemmy.world/post/9554256
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?
#nostupidquestions
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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.
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?!
I prefer to use “semiweekly” for twice in a week, and so on for other periods.
Use it in a sentence:
I used to get hard every day, but now I’m lucky to get a semiweekly
Please start a word of the day series
they used to eat semolina but now they eat semiweekly
i'd interpret that as half-way to weekly, or once every two weeks
Lmao I’d interpret that as every two weeks. Semi meaning “almost”, so “semiweekly” would mean almost weekly, hence, every two weeks. I guess you could think “almost” the other way but I feel like semi is usually used in a way that is “quite but not as good”, twice a week would be more than once a week so I semi would have to be every two weeks in my mind.
Semi just means half. Semifinals, semester, semi-truck, etc.
Right, so half the frequency, meaning every two weeks, yes?
Semi means half. Period.
Yes. But really no.
Yes, so the frequency being weekly: Half that frequency is every two weeks.
We meet once a month (monthly)
We meet once a week (weekly)
We meet once a semiweek (semiweekly)
We meet once a day (daily)
See the pattern here? Half the interval, not half the frequency. I hope you were just being cheeky.
I’m not being cheeky. That’s how I perceive the thing, but I’m not a native English speaker and french has a way to distinguish between both cases without using semi(which is confusing too imo). Bimensuel => 2 times a month Bimestriel => every two months
I agree. If someone told me they wanted to do something semi weekly I’d assume they meant about once every week or even maybe less.
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.
We should rename it bibi then
attitude.co.uk/…/canadian-author-hilariously-poin… … or it stands for the two lions who like each other very much.
Two bles.
The old and new testament together are two, thus “Bible”.
Before the new testament they just carried around a ble.
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.
Is it twice per Blio or every other Blio, though?
Nonono it’s a documentary about Michael BuBle and his lesser known twin, Bubba BuBle
It means both, twice a week and every two weeks. It’s confusing but what part of english isnt?
The part doesn’t use gendered language as a main component, lol. But otherwise yeah, it’s tricky haha.
An old word that fell out of use to describe a two-week period is “fortnight.”
It should make a come back, but I fear the current generations would always misspell it for… reasons.
Oh, I didn’t get the memo, I used fortnight/ly all the time
Fortnight is in routine usage in the UK.
Very commonly used in Australia.
Old word?
Only in America, surely. Fortnightly is as common as weekly in most other English-speaking nations
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.
That’s actually very true.
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 :)
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.
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.
And plants.
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.
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.
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 most typical “biennial” event is the lifecycle of many plants.
In Australia it means twice a week, we say fortnightly (fourteen-nights) for 2 weeks.
Yeah but the rest of us aren’t savages though…
Kidding, much love to the Aussies. Using fortnight unironically and eating Vegemite voluntarily… you crazy emu-battlers are always up to something wild down there
Today I learned why it’s called a fortnight.
I’ve never once heard that term used in my life in person, only online, though.
And FYI for the peanut gallery: it’s a British term, still in use in the motherland.
So if "bi" is twice, does that mean if you are 'bi-sexual', you only have sex twice?
I was taught that the “bi” prefix was a multiplier and “semi” was a divider.
That meant biweekly, bimonthly, biannually were every 2 weeks, months, years and semi-weekly, semi-monthly, semi-annually were every half a week, half a month, and half a year.
Then the real world intruded and I’ve been confused ever since. About the only time I hear “semi” and “bi” used on a regular basis the way I expect is with pay periods. Biweekly is every two weeks and semi-monthly is twice a month.
Canada, by the way.
PS: I suppose bisexual and semi trailers also fit my expectations.
I’m on your side. Your rule makes sense, and what other people are doing doesn’t make sense.
Stick to your rule and tell everyone else they’re wrong.
The way of the internet
I never heard that semi meant 1/2. I’ve always thought of semi as rather vague tbh. Meaning that there is no set amount of time between things.
bi- means two, as in bicycle: two wheels (circles)
semi- means half, as in semicircle: half of a circle
The problem is that the prefixes can be parsed as affecting either duration/interval as in (bi-week)ly, every two weeks, or frequency as in bi-(weekly), two times weekly. The same applies to semi-.
Personally I find the frequency interpretation a bit of a stretch—“two” is not the same as “two times” or “twice”—so I would tend to read e.g. bimonthly as every two months rather than twice each month.
You can bisect a circle to make two semicircles!
But if it’s semicircular…
bi-sect: cut into two parts; from Latin “bi-”, two, and “secare”, to cut.
The “sect” part is critical. “bi-” on its own doesn’t imply division.
Heh, yeah, I’m just messing with people here 😆
(This language confusion is mildly amusing, in the apparent inherent ambiguity we’ve created)
I prefer the opposite system. If someone said to me: we will meet two weekly, it seems closer to “twice weekly” than once every two weeks. Where as semi weekly saying “half weekly” makes it sound like one half of the weeks we meet and the other half we don’t. I have no idea how anyone thinks that meaning semi-weekly means twice weekly. Even the “we meet every half week” makes little sense to me syntax-wise.
You’re essentially assuming the conclusion by grouping it like that. There are three parts to “biweekly”, “bi-”, “week”, and “-ly”. “Once per biweek”, i.e. once per 14 days (or per fortnight), makes at least as much sense as “two” × “weekly”.
Meeting semiweekly (semiweek-ly, if you must hyphenate it) means meeting every semiweek, or every half-week (3.5 days). Which is an odd internal to meet at if taken literally but would result in meeting twice each week. “Semiannually” is a more common example, and I’ve never seen or heard it used to refer to anything but a 6-month (half-year) interval.
I always assumed semi meant “some fraction of a whole” and “hemi” meant exactly half.
For example, semi truck, semi colon, and even semester aren’t “half” a truck, colon, or school year. But they are fractions of one.
“Semi truck” is not half a truck, but a truck designed to carry one half the weight of the cargo it is hauling. A semi trailer is one designed to have half of its load (by weight) carried by the tow vehicle. A standard trailer gets difficult and possibly dangerous to tow if the weight carried by the tow vehicle (hitch weight) strays too far outside the 8%-12% range.
And just to add to the confusion, Dodge popularized something called the “hemi engine”–an engine with a “hemi head”, not half an engine. And “hemi head” refers not to “1/2 an engine head” but to the approximately hemispherical (1/2 sphere) shape of the combustion chambers cast/machined into the engine head.
This was how I learnt it, too.
Very simple: bi = x2, semi = /2.
Lots of people use the terms wrong, though.
Does weekly mean the frequency or the interval length? Either way, the bi doubles it - to twice the frequency, or twice the pause in between events.
I think either interpretation is fair.
It all comes down to common usage, either interpretation can work. It’s like the phrase “I could care less” now means entirely opposite things to some people.
Biannual means twice a year here. Biennial is used for every two years.
Similarly for biweekly, we have fortnightly for every two weeks which means no-one uses biweekly to mean the same thing.
It’s all just down to common usage though.
The word for "biweekly" you are looking for is "semi-weekly".
If someone told me a thing happened semi-weekly, I would interpret that as almost-but-not-quite weekly, as in, most weeks this thing occurs- but not every week.
If someone asked you to draw a semicircle, would you draw almost a circle but not quite a whole circle? Or, would you draw half of a circle because semi means half?
But a semi truck isn’t half of a truck.
And semi finals are almost the end.
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.
Doesn’t a fortnight mean 10 days or something, though?
Nah a fortnight is two weeks.
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"!
10 days = tenday 14 nights = fourt’night = fortnight
“He T-posed fortnitely down the stairs.”
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.
It means both. Welcome to English.
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.
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.
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.
but weekly × 2 is every 3.5 days and weekly ÷ 2 is every two weeks
Nope. Bi means 2, semi means half.
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.
Compare semi-weekly.
I get those
Bi-semi weekly when I want to be absolutely emphatic that I mean a week.
It can be either, actually. Yes, it’s stupid.
Nope. Bi means 2. Semi means half.
Fortnightly means every two weeks. Bi weekly means twice a week.
whats next? every third tuesday is called a pubg?
I think the conflict is between invisibly different sub-word groupings. I think of them as “(biweek)ly” = “happens every biweek” = "happens every two weeks, vs. “Bi(weekly)” = “happens twice as much as weekly” = “happens two times every week”.
That doesn’t really help the ambiguity, so I prefer other ways of describing the recurrent timing of events when there isn’t anything obviously disambiguating them - for example, if I create a digital calendar event and name it “biweekly event”, the existence/nonexistence of repeated calendar events makes it obvious what is meant.
At least in the Google calendar if I make an event and set it to repeat every N number of weeks It asks me how many N is.
Then I can just put 2
There’s no option for bi-weekly you just have to put the number two in the box, that seems to get rid of ambiguity.
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
Wait, so bi-weekly and bi-monthly mean almost the same thing (every 14/15 days)? That’s insanity!
February jumps for joy!
Feb is so based it can’t jump.
And there’s also a fortnight.
Bi-weekly means twice a week, and bi-monthly (Which outside of banking I’ve never heard anyone ever use) means every 2 weeks.
So if I do something bi-weekly then in a month I’ve done it eight times. If I do something bi-monthly then in a month I’ve done it two times.
English is stupid. Even native speakers don’t understand it.
Interestingly enough my spell check refuses to even acknowledge that bi-monthly is a valid word. It’s fine with bi-weekly though. So it’s entirely possible there is actually no such word and it’s just been created by the banking industry to get around the fact that for some reason they can’t use fortnight.
Nope.
Nope. Neither of those terms means twice per month.
This is semantically correct and everyone else is wrong. Semi weekly is every other week. The widespread confusion on this is the surest sign that degeneracy prevails in the world.
Semiweekly is twice a week (semi meaning half, so every ‘semiweek’ or half-week).
do you also consider “awful” to mean “full of awe” and be a synonym to awesome?
Person 01: How are we doing with that critical deliverable?
Person 02: It’s outstanding.
Person 01: So it’s great or missing?
Person 02: Yes.
Hey, it’s one less thing to worry about. Right? 😉
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
Nope. Just means 2 weeks.
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.
On the last part: sometimes words drift to be widely accepted as an exact opposite of the original meaning. I think that happens because they were never popular enough for people to remember what they really meant or because too many people used them incorrectly.
An example you gave “fat chances” feels like it was originally sarcastic but then stuck, “quite a bit” feels the same way although I don’t know for sure.
And then apparently there are also contronyms that has exact opposite meaning, so yeah some things just require more explanation 😅
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.
What? No. Semi weekly only ever means twice per week. If you get paid on the 1st and 15th, you get paid semi monthly.
Yeah. That makes no sense. While it seems the bi- prefix is ambiguous, semi- means “half”. I don’t see how semiweekly can possibility mean every other week.
I hate the fact that you can’t correct people on language once a critical mass of misunderstanding happens and the dictionary codifies it. I get that is how dictionaries work, but it doesn’t mean I have to accept people saying biweekly to mean semiweekly. We have two words for two concepts, and we’re losing that.
If semi means half, then semi-weekly means half weekly. The problem is that this is still ambiguous, as you can interpret it as half the time span, so twice a week, or half the frequency, so ones every 2 weeks.
I know there is a difference in how people perceive time and I feel like this has something to do with that, but I can’t quite put it to words
I get it can be confusing. We all have little mental quirks that sometimes make us feel like most people get something we don’t. Eg, one of mine is that I can’t get used to a digital watch. I like the more graphical format of an analog dial.
I just wish people would consult a dictionary a little more often than they do. Instead, it seems like they hope to confuse enough people to change the dictionary.
Why not say fortnightly to remove any ambiguity?
I’m just saying that whenever someone says “biweekly”, it is now incumbent on me to ask, “do you mean fortnightly or semiweekly?”. It slows down communication for no real benefit.
I do sometimes say “fortnightly”, but as I already have a Backpfeifengesicht, I try to avoid it.
I’ve never heard of the concept of being paid twice a week, unless if you get paid daily but only worked twice that week. Is that really a thing in payroll, because I’ve only heard of biweekly pay to mean once every two weeks.
Semiweekly isn’t a term I’ve ever heard, but I’ve never worked at a bank.
That’s insane I would understand both of those terms to mean the exact opposite of what you described.
Also who gets paid twice a week and how do I arrange for that.
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.
thanks for the explanation, as an Australian reading this I had no idea what was going on cause bi-weekly means bi-weekly here and fortnight is every two weeks.
Til Americans don’t have fortnights…
They don’t have “scores” either at least anymore.
Don’t they have scores when lots of people die? The news here only ever uses scores when it’s referring to loss of life. like if a building collapsed. they’d say ‘scores of people were killed today etc…’
“Scores” just means “a lot”. Nobody here uses “score” (singular) to mean 20.
wtf does 20 have to do with anything?
That’s how much a score is.
so?
So I was relying to a comment about scores. Do you not understand how conversation works?
not this one no
We do, we’re typically familiar with the concept it’s just not something we say. Kinda like how we know what autumn is but we just call it fall.
It’s kinda weird but I’m sure you know the feeling with some words you know of but it’s kinda weird for people to use in a sentence.
What’s the adjective in American for “having to do with the season fall?”
Autumnal. It’s not used much.
Even worse is bisexual not meaning “having sex twice”. Ask me how I know…
How do you know?
Hey, long time. Do you want to have sex again? No, it’s my girlfriend’s turn now…
Incorrect. Bisexual doesnt mean twice per sex, it means 2 sexes.
So?
Fortnightly FTW. We can always (try to) re-educate the masses!
Bicebtennial
Bi means 2. Bi weekly means 2 weeks.
Semi means half. Semi weekly means every half week or twice per week.
This is the first time I hear about semi weekly
Semi weekly sounds like it means every two weeks
Semi-weekly happens once every semi-week. Much like a semi-circle is half a circle, a semi-week is half a week. Once every half-week is twice weekly.
A bi-week is 2 weeks. Once every two weeks.
Because “weekly” is kind of a fraction (1/week), and 2/week and 1/(2week) are very different, but both can be pronounced very similarly. Read kind of like (2-week)ly and 2-(weekly). Which is why both meanings are used, so you need to use context to disambiguate, or just guess if context isn’t available.
This is also the reason why in this thread people say “semiweekly” is the other option, but they don’t all use the same other option. You have the same, but inverse problem there.