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.
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.
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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.
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.
If someone said to me: we will meet two weekly…
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”.
I have no idea how anyone thinks that meaning semi-weekly means twice 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Fortnightly FTW. We can always (try to) re-educate the masses!
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?
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?
Nah a fortnight is two weeks.
Nah a fortnight is two weeks
Nah
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"!
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.
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.
Semi just means half. Semifinals, semester, semi-truck, etc.
Right, so half the frequency, meaning every two weeks, yes?
Semi means half. Period.
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
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Yes. But really no.
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’d interpret that as half-way to weekly, or once every two 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 😅
I love this whole post. Do you have any more examples?
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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
