Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Biweekly and bimonthly each also meaning their respective reciprocals.
(Every two periods, or twice a period.)
If a technical term such as a frequency specifier has multiple incompatible meanings then it has no value and needs to stop being used entirely. Or one of the meanings chosen as correct and the others rejected forcefully (good luck with that)
Fortnightly is every two weeks, bimonthly in every two months. Biannual is twice a year, and biennial is every two yeara.
Fortnightly is fine, so is biennial.
All of the other bi-timeperiod words are worthless because they mean both twice each time and every two times.
"He T-Posed Fortnitely down the stairs"
It's funny that there are two unambiguous alternatives to bimonthly, but they both mean 2x/month: fortnightly and semimonthly.
Both German and Dutch distinguish their equivalent words with clear prefixes meaning half- and two-. The English word was unclear after 1066 since the French word bimensuel would have been used by the new bosses. And that means 2x/month. English used bimensual for a while before developing a new, worse word with the Latin origin bi- and the Germanic origin -monthly. And it seems to have been ambiguous from the start. So this has probably been messed up for almost 1050 years.
Maybe we should resurrect the Old English prefix twi- to make a new(old) 1x/2months word twimonthly or more intuitively, twomonthly that we can use in opposition with halfmonthly.
Eh? Semi-monthly is twice a month. Bimonthly is every two months.
Semi-weekly is twice a week, biweekly is fortnightly, every two weeks.
They work the same.
Look up "bimonthly pay".
I'm paid twice a month and they call it semi-monthly here though, husband is paid every two weeks and his company calls that biweekly.
I would never use bimonthly to mean twice a month, and haven't heard anyone use it that way in real life; but the only thing that happens twice a month for me is payroll, so it hasn't come up in conversation outside of that.
I guess I share in your outrage then.