• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

People Are Confused At What “Biweekly” Actually Means

June 4, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. That dreaded moment when your boss asks you to schedule a “biweekly” call, and you have no idea what they mean. Is that twice a week or once every two weeks? We know lots of people are stumped by this so, good people that we are, we thought we might try and help. Famous last words…

Advertisement

Biweekly, according to the dictionary doyens at Merriam-Webster, means both “twice per week” and “once every two weeks”. Yep. It’s both.

Advertisement

“Biweekly and bimonthly each have a pair of meanings that are unhelpfully at odds with one another,” Merriam-Webster confirms, but if you’re looking for sympathy, you won’t find it here. “Those meanings exist, and we cannot ignore them.”

Just because a term has two meanings, it doesn’t mean both are used with equal frequency. According to Grammarly, most native American English speakers tend to use “biweekly” when they mean twice a week, but it can still be near-impossible to tell – even from the context – what someone actually means.

As a Brit, I feel compelled to point out here that we already have a lovely word that might help in these scenarios: fortnightly. With this, we can reserve biweekly to only mean twice a week, and everyone’s blood pressure can drop a couple of points. For some reason, however, this term has not gained much traction on the other side of the Atlantic, leaving scores of native English speakers mired in “biweekly”-based bewilderment.

And it doesn’t end there. As Merriam-Webster mentions, “bimonthly” has the same issue, meaning both twice per month and once every two months. Where this gets really tricky is that you could have workers being paid on the same two Fridays every month, but half of them could say they get paid biweekly while the other half could say they get paid bimonthly.

Advertisement

How’s that headache feeling?

When we get up to years, the confusion theoretically ends: “biannual” means twice a year, while the similar-but-different “biennial” means once every two years. We say, “theoretically ends”, because biannual and biennial are often used interchangeably and incorrectly. It’s basically just really difficult to refer to having two of something.

The origin of all this difficulty is the prefix “bi-”, which has always had this double meaning. Originating from Latin, it has various meanings including “two, having two, twice, double, doubly, twofold, once every two.” The ambiguity is, sadly, baked right in.

If you’re not ready to adopt fortnightly as an alternative just yet, the best way around this confusion is simply to spell it out – avoid the word biweekly altogether and just tell people whether you mean twice a week or every two weeks.

Advertisement

“English is sometimes simply obstreperous,” Merriam-Webster reminds us. So next time you get that dreaded request from your boss, you’ll probably have to just bite the bullet and ask them what exactly they’re looking for.

And if this is a common issue for you, you might even consider scheduling yourself a biweekly reminder to check this article. Or bimonthly – whatever works.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Vietnam’s biggest city to keep virus curbs, flight resumption sought
  2. DCVC partner and Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen bound for space on Blue Origin’s second human flight
  3. How Did Ancient Romans Build Aqueducts?
  4. The Placebo Effect: Good Or Bad For Us?

Source Link: People Are Confused At What “Biweekly” Actually Means

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version