At a Seattle, Washington, tech company, Vivian finds that she and her fellow employees are continually vexed by this question: Does bimonthly mean “once every two weeks” or “once every two months”? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What’s the Actual Meaning of “Bimonthly”?”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Vivian. I’m calling in from Seattle.
Hi, Vivian. Welcome to the show.
So, you know, like everyone who does a ton of computer work, most of my days are spent in meetings in a corporate setting.
And half of these are these recurring meetings that either I have to schedule myself or that, you know, other schedules with me.
And so my question concerns how we refer to the reoccurrence because it’s been bugging me ever since I had my first corporate job.
And so the specific question I have, and I’d love to understand your thoughts about the system here as well, is how can biweekly simultaneously mean twice a week and every other week?
Yeah, that can cause problems in the workplace, right?
It definitely can.
And I’m just completely confused how these numeric prefixes work with our common measures of time to mean what they mean.
And, you know, it seems like at least in the company I work for, biweekly meetings are really common and we’ve taken it to meet every other week.
But to me, it definitely sounds like it should be twice a week.
Yeah, biweekly is just one of those words that we call a skunked word because different people can take it different ways and it’s just so confusing.
If you want to get technical about it, when you’re modifying an adverb of time and you’re using the prefix by, which means two, that time interval should be doubled.
So if you’re having a biweekly meeting, that occurs one time every two weeks.
And a bimonthly meeting takes place once every two months.
But the best thing to do is just to say exactly what it is, you know, twice a month or every two weeks or something like that.
Because biweekly is just right, Grant.
I mean, it’s just a skunk’s term.
You’re just inviting confusion from new employees or people outside vendors or new partners working with the company.
I mean, if you have to keep explaining this particular usage to everyone, it’s just going to cause problems.
Or say semi-weekly or semi-monthly to avoid the bi-weekly altogether.
Yeah, Grant raises a good point.
Even if you’re using it consistently within your company, somebody else from the outside might not get it and might show up for a meeting when they shouldn’t have or miss one.
If you’re talking about the prefix semi, it means that the interval of time should be cut in half.
So a semi-monthly meeting is going to be held twice a month, cutting the month in half.
But the best thing to do is just to say specifically when that meeting is.
Totally.
And I actually work as a designer and primarily working on apps and websites.
And so something that’s really important to me when I’m designing all these screens is like how do you label things and what are the instructions?
And I noticed that, you know, in like the email program, like Outlook that lets you schedule meetings, they’re just very clear that it’s about like the specific measure of time.
Like you said, Martha and Grant, which is like every two weeks or like every other day or rather than using these numeric prefixes, which can be so confusing.
Right. It’s a shame that we don’t have good shorthand for this.
But but again, spelling it out with more words in this case is worth it.
Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense.
And you know how in the corporate setting, everyone just loves to make very short, snappy communication.
And we love our jargon, but it totally gets in the way sometimes, as you said, especially with newer people.
And especially working with co-workers from across the world, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Yeah. Thank you so much for answering my question.
And I just wanted to say I especially love when you two bring us really interesting sayings from other languages around the world.
They just paint these really vivid pictures, and, you know, they’re my favorite part of the show.
So thank you so much.
Oh, really?
We’ll try to do more of that just for you, Vivian.
We will.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Thanks, Vivian.
