Shower Thoughts

One hill I will die on: bi-weekly should only ever mean twice a week. Semi-weekly (or fortnightly) is for once every two weeks.

I will mute everyone who disagrees and pretend they never existed

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

I feel like this is a uniquely American term, but is it ambiguous to anyone For me, it's just an adjective applying to any object (e.g., an area) that involves three different statesnnIf your question is specifically about tri-, I see no confusion there, but then again I studied Latin and my native language is a Romance one, so bi-, tri-, quadri-, etc. are natural prefixes for me

I’m also a non-American, Romance language native speaker who studied Latin for years. That’s why I’m firmly in the camp that bi- means twice and semi- means half.

Something happening twice a week is “bis in hebdomada” in Latin (giving “bi-hebdomadaire” in French, meaning twice weekly); and something half cooked is “semicrematus”.

So there should be no ambiguity that biweekly is twice a week, and semi-weekly is half weekly.

Nobody ever misinterprets the words “bisexual” nor “semicircle”, for example, but somehow the time domain trips people up