Word for Anniversary Ending in Five or Zero?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Danielle from Oklahoma City.

Hi, Danielle in Oklahoma City. What’s up?

There’s a podcast in the New England area that covers sports and entertainment.

And Jason, one of the co-hosts, has a theory that every five years,

Let’s say on the celebration of 30, 35, 20, 25,

It’s a bigger celebration if it ends in fives and zeros.

And so he believes, and his two co-hosts, Liam and Bill, do not agree with him,

But there is a word that ends in fives and zeros of celebration.

I have like three guesses on it because I think he’s like, right, but there may not be a word.

And so we’ve been trying to find what the word is.

Let’s clarify for a second, Danielle.

So you’re saying that he believes, although he can’t name it,

That there’s a word to use to describe the years that end in five and zeros.

Yes.

You mean like a round birthday, like when you turn 40 and you call that a round birthday?

Birthday or a round number yeah yeah for those particular words and the decades are easy but

You’re looking for something decades and the five year yeah right the only thing i can think of in

Terms of that period of time is the word lustrum l-u-s-t-r-u-m i doubt that’s the word that he

Was thinking of but it refers to a period of five years and it goes back to an old roman practice of

Doing a ritual sacrifice every time they did the census, which was every five years.

So it actually goes back to an old word that means to wash.

I think it’s like, you know, laboratory or something like that.

Lustrum, which is kind of a sexy word, but probably not what you’re looking for.

Right.

And what’s funny is like, you know, I’m in Oklahoma City and podcast radio shows in New

England and everyone from around the world, this has been a debate for like two years.

Does this term exist or not?

And every time you’re first to it, it’s like five and zero.

With something that is in five and zeros.

And there’s like, I’d say 90% of people,

It sounds like they don’t believe him.

And I’m like, I think he’s like got an idea.

He might have a concept,

But like the word is what nobody knows does it exist.

So that one, correct.

That’s great.

I don’t know if that’s funny to me.

Daniel, are you saying that this podcast guy

Actually knows the word and is withholding it?

No, I don’t think he,

It’s like, cause he went to him and his friends,

I think they all went to like school for like film.

Yeah.

Journalism, I guess, would be the category.

He remembers hearing the word or understanding the concept,

But I think he’s blanked on the word.

Now, if he’s holding it from us, then I’d be like, hey, Jason.

Yeah.

I’ve got to tell you, if people have been working on this problem for two years

And you’ve come to me and Martha and we don’t have an answer,

I’m not saying that we know everything,

But I’m saying all those other people plus the two of us,

There’s a good chance that he is just having a lot of wishful thinking.

I mean, you can just call it a big anniversary and be done with it, right?

We don’t have to have a special term for that.

And frankly, any new term that you would coin or an old one like lustrum that you would bring back is just going to sow confusion because people don’t know it.

And so then you have a whole new job of confusing them with a word that you didn’t used to have.

So really just call it a big anniversary and be done with it and continue to talk about the patriots and the, you know, the ball gate and all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, Grant and I can tell you all kinds of words that are put together with Latin words,

Like quindecennial is a 15-year anniversary and things like that.

I could see corning something like infennial.

You know, we take inf, which just means some unknown number of counts,

And then annual, which means annual, and just the infennial.

But you would probably use something like that when you didn’t know how many years it truly was.

It’s fun to have these things to argue about.

They certainly stop us from fighting in the parking lot over sports teams.

But really, I would just email them and say, dear gentlemen, wrap it up.

But I appreciate it.

Because, again, we could all coin something, but making it catch, that’s an impossible task.

Yeah.

Or nearly impossible.

Well, thank you, guys.

Y’all have a good day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Maybe you know the word.

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