Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week."
Why does bi-weekly mean "every two weeks?" This has always bothered me because intuitively it should mean "twice a week."
Similar case in point: "bimonthly" means "twice a month." That makes sense.
But the definition for "bi-weekly" does not make sense.
What do you think?
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I think the conflict is between invisibly different sub-word groupings. I think of them as "(biweek)ly" = "happens every biweek" = "happens every two weeks, vs. "Bi(weekly)" = "happens twice as much as weekly" = "happens two times every week".
That doesn't really help the ambiguity, so I prefer other ways of describing the recurrent timing of events when there isn't anything obviously disambiguating them - for example, if I create a digital calendar event and name it "biweekly event", the existence/nonexistence of repeated calendar events makes it obvious what is meant.
At least in the Google calendar if I make an event and set it to repeat every N number of weeks It asks me how many N is.
Then I can just put 2
There's no option for bi-weekly you just have to put the number two in the box, that seems to get rid of ambiguity.