It’s enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. That dreaded moment when your boss asks you to schedule a “biweekly” call, and you have no idea what they mean. Is that twice a week or once every two weeks? We know lots of people are stumped by this so, good people that we are, we thought we might try and help. Famous last words…
Biweekly, according to the dictionary doyens at Merriam-Webster, means both “twice per week” and “once every two weeks”. Yep. It’s both.
“Biweekly and bimonthly each have a pair of meanings that are unhelpfully at odds with one another,” Merriam-Webster confirms, but if you’re looking for sympathy, you won’t find it here. “Those meanings exist, and we cannot ignore them.”
Just because a term has two meanings, it doesn’t mean both are used with equal frequency. According to Grammarly, most native American English speakers tend to use “biweekly” when they mean twice a week, but it can still be near-impossible to tell – even from the context – what someone actually means.
As a Brit, I feel compelled to point out here that we already have a lovely word that might help in these scenarios: fortnightly. With this, we can reserve biweekly to only mean twice a week, and everyone’s blood pressure can drop a couple of points. For some reason, however, this term has not gained much traction on the other side of the Atlantic, leaving scores of native English speakers mired in “biweekly”-based bewilderment.
And it doesn’t end there. As Merriam-Webster mentions, “bimonthly” has the same issue, meaning both twice per month and once every two months. Where this gets really tricky is that you could have workers being paid on the same two Fridays every month, but half of them could say they get paid biweekly while the other half could say they get paid bimonthly.
How’s that headache feeling?
When we get up to years, the confusion theoretically ends: “biannual” means twice a year, while the similar-but-different “biennial” means once every two years. We say, “theoretically ends”, because biannual and biennial are often used interchangeably and incorrectly. It’s basically just really difficult to refer to having two of something.
The origin of all this difficulty is the prefix “bi-”, which has always had this double meaning. Originating from Latin, it has various meanings including “two, having two, twice, double, doubly, twofold, once every two.” The ambiguity is, sadly, baked right in.
If you’re not ready to adopt fortnightly as an alternative just yet, the best way around this confusion is simply to spell it out – avoid the word biweekly altogether and just tell people whether you mean twice a week or every two weeks.
“English is sometimes simply obstreperous,” Merriam-Webster reminds us. So next time you get that dreaded request from your boss, you’ll probably have to just bite the bullet and ask them what exactly they’re looking for.
And if this is a common issue for you, you might even consider scheduling yourself a biweekly reminder to check this article. Or bimonthly – whatever works.
