Biweekly. Bimonthly. If you are reading this in hopes of clarifying the proper use and meaning of these words, I’m warning you in advance: We are walking into darkness, and things may not end happily.
Consult Merriam-Webster, and you will learn that “biweekly” means “occurring every two weeks” — plus, also, “occurring twice a week.” Cambridge Dictionary will tell you that a “bimonthly” event happens “every two months or twice a month.” This is the execrable condition in which we find these words. They want to convey hard data about frequency. They are failing miserably at it. Such is life, says Merriam-Webster: The words are “inherently ambiguous.” If you thought looking them up would help, keep dreaming. “This ambiguity cannot be eliminated by the dictionary.”
This goes way back. In 1884, a publication called The Microscopical Bulletin and Optician’s Circular printed a letter from a subscriber who was missing several issues. “The above is a sample of many letters we have received,” The Bulletin said, “our correspondents evidently being under the impression that we publish twice a month. The word ‘bi-monthly’ ought to mean ‘twice a month’ (Latin bis, twice), but it don’t.” The 1800s were full of remarks on this confusion; some even roped in “triweekly,” which meant thrice a week, despite Noah Webster’s scolding that it shouldn’t. In 1877, the British lexicographer Ebenezer Cobham Brewer described the “biweekly” situation as “quite indefensible.” He also objected to combining the Latin bi- (not bis!) with the Germanic “weekly”: If you wanted to say “twice a week,” in his opinion, “it should be Twyweekly.” (Quite a suggestion, given that people were also saying “triweekly.”)
The smart-money consensus, for the record, is that “biweekly” is supposed to mean every two weeks and “bimonthly” every two months. That is what The Associated Press and The Chicago Manual of Style and all those 19th-century grammarians say. Sure, the other usage is common enough that dictionaries are obligated to acknowledge it. But if you want this problem to feel solved, you can stop here and walk away confident that you are doing everything correctly: It’s every two.
The trouble is that deciding what is “correct” does not really resolve ambiguity. There is, for instance, solid agreement that bi- will for some reason affect “annual” in the opposite way it affects “monthly,” giving us “biannual” (twice a year) and “biennial” (every two years). This does not remotely stop people from confusing the two: Clarity solves nothing.
There are also usage guides for “biweekly” and “bimonthly,” but most of their advice just face-plants right back into uncertainty. Merriam-Webster suggests using “semimonthly” for “twice a month,” which doesn’t much clarify “bimonthly” unless people know you’re doing it. An English professor named Michael Adams told CBS News that we should bring back “fortnight,” the old shortening of “14 nights,” so that we “don’t have to worry about ‘biweekly’ or ‘bimonthly’ meaning two things.” But two weeks and half a month are not the same: A semimonthly paycheck arrives 24 times per year, a fortnightly one 26. Every “biweekly” or “bimonthly” explainer seems to arrive at the same drastic conclusion: Abandon these words. They are hopelessly compromised. Just say “twice a month” or “every other month” or whatever.
My question is: Does this bother you? Does it feel like a tiny piece of linguistic machinery has snapped off and is clanking around in desperate need of mending? Do you feel a need to fix it?
I ask because I have a difficult relationship with the part of me that would answer “yes” — the part that wants language to work in a mechanistic, lawyerly way, with words and grammar carrying precise, parsable meanings independent of their speakers’ intent.
This impulse is not always lovable. I once became comically overinvested in an argument about numerical agreements between the subjects and objects of sentences, insisting that a sentence like “Commuters should park their car in Lot C” meant all the commuters shared a single vehicle. I was torn last week when one of my 6-year-old daughter’s iPad games told her to “tap anywhere” and she started giggling and tapping the tabletop in feigned confusion: “It said tap anywhere!” I felt a surge of that’s-my-kid pride — 6 years old, and she’s already getting a laugh out of being willfully pedantic about language! — but also the worry that I had helped infect an innocent child with an approach to language that’s widely considered tedious and annoying, one I spent a chunk of my own youth learning when to set aside.
We all approach language this way eventually. If somebody asks you to pass the salt and then gets mad because they meant pepper, you’re unlikely to apologize for being too literal. Words do mean things; this is what makes talking different from mind reading. English is capable of conveying so many fine distinctions and crisp subtleties, no mind reading required — but only when we all share an understanding of how it’s doing so. And once the language and the distinctions involved get even slightly complex, that shared understanding fades: Communication turns hazy and impressionistic, dissolving into uncertainty, subjectivity and wild guesses about what other people think “biweekly” means.
It is so tempting to imagine fixing this. Couldn’t we impose some rules-based order, stamping out ambiguities, formalizing every last implication of syntax, etching a single meaning of “bimonthly” on a stone pillar and printing it in red in every dictionary? Couldn’t we drain the swamp of language and put in paths and signs? This tragic hope is why grammar nerds get so excited whenever a multimillion-dollar lawsuit hinges on a single comma in a contract, and the strict meaning of language is finally dignified with real consequences. This tragic hope is also, as Merriam-Webster puts it, “as whispers into a gale” — like insisting that it is objectively better to load the dishwasher this way when you have 1.5 billion roommates.
“Biweekly” should probably mean every other week. Knowing this does not really help.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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