If you’re chatting with friends or sending a casual email, “twice a week” or “every other week” would suffice. We have two words for events occurring in periods of years – biannual meaning twice a year, and biennial meaning once every two years. Another synonym for biweekly is semiweekly, which means “twice a week.” The prefix semi- means half or partially. For maximum clarity, writing “every 2 weeks” or “twice a week” is advisable (regardless of correctness or incorrectness of “biweekly” in either sense).
- Robert J. Samuelson has written a bi-weekly column for Newsweek since 1984.
- If you’re communicating with someone from another country, especially from the UK, “fortnightly” might be more familiar to them.
- Biweekly means both, but most American English speakers use it to refer to something occurring every other week or twice monthly.
- Add biweekly to one of your lists below, or create a new one.
- This connection may be general or specific, or the words may appear frequently together.
Although this is an acceptable synonym for biweekly, it’s not a common term for American English speakers. We’ll dive deeper into the meaning of biweekly, why it sometimes confuses people, provide synonyms to avoid uncertainty, and discuss other time-related words that use the bi- prefix. In business meetings or official documents, “fortnightly” or “every other week” might be more appropriate.
Are there any words I can use to disambiguate “biweekly”?
They sound professional and are less likely to cause confusion. Technically, semiweekly is the term that you’re looking https://accounting-services.net/ for. But if you’re trying to avoid ambiguity, then go with something like “twice a week” like Hugo suggested.
Biweekly Sentence Examples
These were bi-weekly, with various possibilities of casual arrivals besides. They worked it all up from the boiler-plate war news in the Bi-weekly and Luke’s school geography. Robert J. Samuelson has written a bi-weekly column for Newsweek since 1984. For a person making $50,000, that cut meant an extra $1,000 in income, or about $40 for every bi-weekly paycheck.
Take a (break/brake) and (pore/pour) over this (cache/cachet/cash) of questions about commonly confused words. Not everything has to be a single word, so don’t be biweekly synonym afraid to use more than one word when you want to use clear, understandable, unambiguous language. Add biweekly to one of your lists below, or create a new one.
I agree with those who suggested “fortnightly.” If someone feels that it’s antiquated or “odd,” that is their problem! Besides the ambiguity of the words “bi-weekly” or “bi-monthly,” I think that they are esthetically ugly and artificial words that detract from the English language. Try “twice weekly,” if “fortnightly” doesn’t do it for you. While biweekly is one of the most commonly confused words with the bi- prefix, it’s not the only one. This means that paychecks will be issued once every two weeks, usually on the same day. There are 52 weeks in a calendar year, meaning that people paid on a biweekly basis receive 26 paychecks per year.
For, as anyone who pays attention to our work surely recognizes, we are at the mercy of the language. We diligently record the English lexicon in both its measured expansions and its wild proliferations, and any insistence by us that it favor the former over the latter is as whispers into a gale. Biweekly and bimonthly each have a pair of meanings that are unhelpfully at odds with one another.
How to use biweekly in a sentence
Are there any other words we could use which could help, particularly words which mean “twice a week”? I’m looking particularly because some of my colleagues speak English only as a second language, and find fortnightly difficult to remember. Biweekly means twice a week or once every other week, though it’s more commonly used to refer to the latter. Hyphens are not used after the prefix bi- unless the root word starts with the letter I. The Essex Institute has its Field-meetings,its pleasant bi-weekly summer visits into the country, and is everywhere welcome.
This connection may be general or specific, or the words may appear frequently together. Biweekly means both, but most American English speakers use it to refer to something occurring every other week or twice monthly. Biannual is more straightforward, as it’s only used to mean twice a year.
A biweekly meeting with your manager takes place once every two weeks unless otherwise specified. A semiweekly meeting, on the other hand, occurs twice a week. Biweekly is most commonly used to refer to the cadence of meetings or paychecks. In both cases, it’s commonly understood to mean twice monthly or once every other week, usually taking place on the same day of the week. British people use the word fortnight—which derives from the old English word for “fourteen nights”—to refer to events that occur once every two weeks.
It is sometimes used for meetings held once every two years. There are three times as many Google hits for semi-annual as bi-annual, so that could indicate a lack of confidence in using bi-. Use fortnightly for “once every two weeks”, and twice a week for, well, “twice a week”. We can use fortnightly to indicate once every two weeks and help disambiguate that way.
Now a biweekly with a circulation of 50,000, the New Republic could use an infusion of cash. If you have an annual salary of $1 million, your biweekly paycheck will be about $38,000. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. An Ben Watson asked could he have a copy to put in the Biweekly. They worked it all up from the boiler-plate war news in the Biweekly and Lukes school geography.
So while most people use it to mean once every two weeks, both definitions are grammatically correct. It’s important to provide context as to which definition you’re using when developing a meeting agenda or other documents for other people. But what about when you’re at the mercy of English as it’s wielded by others?
If you’re keen on enhancing your vocabulary or understanding the nuances of language, there are several online platforms and resources available. Websites like Oxford Dictionaries or Merriam-Webster provide detailed explanations and usage examples for a wide range of words. For those looking to practice and improve their language skills, platforms like Duolingo offer interactive lessons in multiple languages.
