No Stupid Questions

2301 readers

85 users here now

There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!

Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.

ex. How do I change oil
ex. How to tie shoes
ex. Can you cry underwater?

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!

Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice 🍉.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

174

Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week." (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

177 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

Fortnight is in routine usage in the UK.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Old word?

Only in America, surely. Fortnightly is as common as weekly in most other English-speaking nations

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Oh, I didn't get the memo, I used fortnight/ly all the time

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Very commonly used in Australia.