Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week."
Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week."
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?
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.
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
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.
Two bles.
The old and new testament together are two, thus "Bible".
Before the new testament they just carried around a ble.
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.
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.
This was how I learnt it, too.
Very simple: bi = x2, semi = /2.
Lots of people use the terms wrong, though.
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.
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 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.
Nope. Bi means 2, semi means half.
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
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.
Fortnightly FTW. We can always (try to) re-educate the masses!
Incorrect. Bisexual doesnt mean twice per sex, it means 2 sexes.
So?
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.
It can be either, actually. Yes, it's stupid.
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.
Bi means 2. Bi weekly means 2 weeks.
Semi means half. Semi weekly means every half week or twice per week.
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.
This is the first time I hear about semi weekly
Wait, so bi-weekly and bi-monthly mean almost the same thing (every 14/15 days)? That's insanity!
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.
February jumps for joy!
Feb is so based it can't jump.
And there's also a fortnight.
Nope. Neither of those terms means twice per month.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
i'd interpret that as half-way to weekly, or once every two weeks
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.
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.
Compare semi-weekly.
Bi-semi weekly when I want to be absolutely emphatic that I mean a week.
I get those
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
And FYI for the peanut gallery: it's a British term, still in use in the motherland.
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.
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.
Fortnight is in routine usage in the UK.
Old word?
Only in America, surely. Fortnightly is as common as weekly in most other English-speaking nations
Oh, I didn't get the memo, I used fortnight/ly all the time
Very commonly used in Australia.
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 :)
Fortnightly means every two weeks. Bi weekly means twice a week.
whats next? every third tuesday is called a pubg?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes it does not make sense English is a dumb language. See also: bicycle and bisection
Bicycle = 2 wheels Bisection = to divide into 2 parts
What dont you understand?
English is devoid of logic in many places but bicycle and bisection seems to follow the same pattern of something two
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? 😉