month

en-noun

month (plural months or (UK colloquial) month)

months (plural)
month (UK colloquial plural)
moneth (alternative)

From Middle English mon(e)th, from Old English mōnaþ, from Proto-West Germanic *mānōþ, from Proto-Germanic *mēnōþs (“month”), from Proto-Indo-European *mḗh₁n̥s (“moon, month”), probably derived from *meh₁- (“measure”) with moon-cycles being used to measure time. Related to English moon.

inh

pinch and a punch for the first of the month

July is my favourite month.

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:

A period into which a year is divided, historically based on the phases of the moon.

We went on holiday for two months.

Charles had not been employed above six months at Darracott Place, but he was not such a whopstraw as to make the least noise in the performance of his duties when his lordship was out of humour.

1959, Georgette Heyer, chapter 1, in The Unknown Ajax:

With the north London derby to come at the weekend, Spurs boss Harry Redknapp opted to rest many of his key players, although he brought back Aaron Lennon after a month out through injury.

2011 September 29, Jon Smith, “Tottenham 3-1 Shamrock Rovers”, in BBC Sport:

The demolition of two mosques in India within days of each other has highlighted the deep religious divide in the country, months before voters head to the polls for a nationwide election that is expected to hand Prime Minister Narendra Modi a rare third term in power.

2024 February 15, Aishwarya S Iyer and Rhea Mogul, “‘Erasing a part of history’ – What a double mosque demolition tells us about India ahead of crucial election”, in CNN:

A period of 30 days, 31 days, or some alternation thereof.


day

days (plural)
daie (alternative obsolete)
daye (alternative obsolete)

Sranan Tongo: dei

Etymology tree
Middle English day
English day
Inherited from Middle English day, from Old English dæġ (“day”), from Proto-West Germanic *dag, from Proto-Germanic *dagaz (“day”); see there for more.
Cognate with Saterland Frisian Dai (“day”), West Frisian dei (“day”), Dutch dag (“day”), German Low German Dag (“day”), Alemannic German Däi (“day”), German Tag (“day”), Swedish, Norwegian and Danish dag (“day”), Icelandic dagur (“day”), Gothic 𐌳𐌰𐌲𐍃 (dags, “day”). Possible cognates beyond Germanic relatives include Albanian djeg (“to burn”), Lithuanian degti (“to burn”), Tocharian A tsäk-, Russian жечь (žečʹ, “to burn”), Sanskrit दाह (dāhá, “heat”), दहति (dáhati, “to burn”), Latin foveō (“to warm, keep warm, incubate”).
Latin diēs, Russian день (denʹ), Lithuanian dienà are false cognates; they all derive from Proto-Indo-European *dyew- (“to shine”).

cog

any day of the week and twice on Sundays

even a stopped clock is right twice a day

every day of the week and twice on Sundays

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof

A period of time equal or almost equal to a full day-night cycle.

The time taken for the Sun to seem to be in the same place in the sky twice; a solar day.

The time taken for the Earth to make a full rotation about its axis with respect to the fixed stars; a sidereal day or stellar day.

I've been here for two days and a bit.

The day begins at midnight.

Monday is the first day of the week in many countries of the world.

A period of time between two set times which mark the beginning and the end of day in a calendar, such as from midnight to the following midnight or (Judaism) from nightfall to the following nightfall.

يَوْم

period from midnight to the following midnight


hour

hours (plural)
hower (alternative obsolete)
houre (alternative obsolete)
howre (alternative obsolete)

Bislama: aua

Tok Pisin: aua

→ Hausa: awa

From Middle English houre, hour, oure, from Anglo-Norman houre, from Old French houre, (h)ore, from Latin hōra (“hour”), from Ancient Greek ὥρα (hṓra, “any time or period, whether of the year, month, or day”), from Proto-Indo-European *yóh₁r̥ (“year, season”). Akin to Old English ġēar (“year”). Doublet of hora and year.
Partly displaced native Old English tīd (“time, hour”), whence Modern English tide.

der

the darkest hour is always just before the dawn

the darkest hour is just before the dawn

I spent an hour at lunch.

During the whole time of his abode in the university he generally spent thirteen hours of the day in study; by which assiduity besides an exact dispatch of the whole course of philosophy, he read over in a manner all classic authors that are extant[…]

1661, John Fell, The Life of the most learned, reverend and pious Dr. H. Hammond:

It is never possible to settle down to the ordinary routine of life at sea until the screw begins to revolve. There is an hour or two, after the passengers have embarked, which is disquieting and fussy.

1915, G[eorge] A. Birmingham [pseudonym; James Owen Hannay], chapter I, in Gossamer, New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran Company, →OCLC:

[Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. The truth is that Newton was very much a product of his time.

2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892:

(time) A unit of time of one twenty-fourth of a day (sixty minutes).

點 /点

unit to denote the hour, such as military usage in English

stound

period of sixty minutes, a season or moment


minute

Tok Pisin: minit

→ Baluchi: منٹ (minaṭṭ)

→ Bengali: মিনিট (miniṭ)

→ Burmese: မိနစ် (mi.nac)

→ Central Dusun: minit

→ Chichewa: miniti

→ Fiji Hindi: minit

→ Fijian: miniti

→ Gujarati: મિનિટ (miniṭ)

→ Hausa: minti

→ Hindi: मिनट (minaṭ)

→ Indonesian: menit

→ Malay: minit

→ Malayalam: മിനിറ്റ് (miniṟṟŭ)

→ Maori: miniti

→ Marathi: मिनिट (miniṭ)

→ Nepali: मिनेट (mineṭ)

→ Odia: ମିନଟ (minaṭa)

→ Pashto: منټ (minëṭ)

→ Punjabi: ਮਿਨਟ (minaṭ)

→ Sinhalese: මිනිත්තුව (minittuwa)

→ Urdu: مِنَٹ (minaṭ)

From Middle English mynute, minute, mynet, from Old French minute, from Medieval Latin minūta (“60th of an hour; note”). Doublet of menu and menudo.

You have twenty minutes to complete the test.

A unit of time which is one sixtieth of an hour (sixty seconds).


millennium

en-noun

millennium (plural millennia or millenniums)

millennia (plural)
millenniums (plural)
millenium (alternative archaic)

From Late Latin mīllennium, from Latin mīllennis (“1000-year”) + -ium (forming abstract nouns).

milénium

year when a period of 1000 years ends and another begins

But these seekers, too, are saved - by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums.

1968, Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edition, London: Fontana Press, published 1993, page 23:

The first known man-made tools, including spear points and axes, were associated with a hunting and gathering pattern that lasted, according to anthropologists, almost 200 millennia.

2013, Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, New York: Random House, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 37:

Magnolias are some of the most primitive of our flowering trees, and fossils dating back millennia prove that they have had little need to evolve.

2013 March 24, Dan Pearson, The Guardian:

(countable) A period of time consisting of one thousand years.

millénaire (continental Normandy; Jersey: millénaithe)


week

weeks (plural)
weeke (alternative obsolete)

→ Maori: wiki

→ Swahili: wiki

From Middle English weke, from Old English wiċe, wucu (“week”), from Proto-West Germanic *wikā, from Proto-Germanic *wikǭ (“turn, succession, change, week”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyg-, *weyk- (“to bend, wind, turn, yield”). Related to Proto-Germanic *wīkaną (“to bend, yield, cease”).
Cognate with Saterland Frisian Wiek, West Frisian wike, Dutch week, German Woche, Danish uge, Norwegian Nynorsk veke, Swedish vecka, Icelandic vika, Gothic 𐍅𐌹𐌺𐍉 (wikō, “turn for temple service”), Latin vicis, Finnish viikko. Related also to Old English wīcan (“to yield, give way”), English weak and wick.

cog

knock someone into the middle of next week

Sunday · Monday · Tuesday · Wednesday · Thursday · Friday · Saturday [edit]

A 4-day week consists of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

A subdivision of the month into longer periods of work days punctuated by shorter weekend periods of days for markets, rest, or religious observation such as a sabbath.

I'll see you Thursday week. [a week on Thursday, i.e. Thursday after next]

The wedding is tomorrow week. [a week tomorrow, i.e. in eight days' time]

(following a named day) A date seven days after (sometimes before) the specified day.


decade

decades (plural)
decad (alternative archaic)

From Middle English decade, from Old French decade, from Late Latin decādem (“(set of) ten”), from Ancient Greek δεκάς (dekás), from δέκα (déka, “ten”). In reference to a span of ten years, originally a clipping of the phrase decade of years. By surface analysis, deca- + -ade. Doublet of decad.

teens · twenties · thirties · forties · fifties · sixties · seventies · eighties · nineties

Gay Nineties · Naughty Nineties · Roaring Twenties · Dirty Thirties · Swinging Sixties

A group, set, or series of ten , particularly:

(Roman Catholicism) A series of prayers counted on a rosary, typically consisting of an Our Father, followed by ten Hail Marys, and concluding with a Glory Be and sometimes the Fatima Prayer.


fortnight

fortnights (plural)
fortnith (alternative dialectal obsolete)

From Middle English fourtenyght, fourtene nyght, from Old English fēowertīene niht (literally “fourteen nights"; the Anglo-Saxons counted by nights), equivalent to fourteen + night. Compare sennight.

Near-synonym: halfmonth

On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri's money.

1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC:

The “lame duck” Johnson Administration, in its final fortnight in office, grappled last week with a diplomatic hot potato in the form of the latest Soviet proposal for a “just and lasting” Middle East peace settlement.

1969 January 12, Benjamin Welles, “A Hot Potato for Nixon”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

(chiefly UK, Ireland, Commonwealth, dated in North America) A period of 2 weeks.


year

en-noun

year (plural years or (UK colloquial) year)

years (plural)
year (UK colloquial plural)
yeah (alternative pronunciation-spelling)
yeare (alternative obsolete)
yeer (alternative obsolete)
yeere (alternative obsolete)
yere (alternative obsolete)
yur (alternative pronunciation-spelling)

Jamaican Creole: ier

Tok Pisin: yia

→ Chuukese: ier

→ Japanese: イヤー (iyā)

→ Volapük: yel

From Middle English yeer, yere, from Old English ġēar (“year”), from Proto-West Germanic *jār, from Proto-Germanic *jērą (“year”), from Proto-Indo-European *yóh₁r̥ (“year, spring”). Doublet of hora and hour.

inh

yeah (non-rhotic with cheer–chair merger)

ашқәс

time it takes for the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun

йыл

a scheduled part of a calendar year spent in a specific activity

triennium

A period of time akin to the time taken for the Earth to undergo a full cycle of seasons.; The length of twelve lunations; the time taken for any moon phase to happen twelve times; a lunar year.

olympiad

A period of time akin to the time taken for the Earth to undergo a full cycle of seasons.; The length of a year as marked by a calendar, 365 or 366 days in the Gregorian calendar; a calendar year.

pentad

A period of time akin to the time taken for the Earth to undergo a full cycle of seasons.; The mean length of a calendar year in the Julian calendar, that is, 365.25 solar days; a Julian year.

decade

A scheduled part of a calendar year spent in a specific activity.; A level or grade in school or college.

The time taken for the Earth to return to the same position along the ecliptic, completing a full cycle of seasons; a tropical year or solar year.

The time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun with respect to the fixed stars; a sidereal year.

we moved to this town a year ago; I quit smoking exactly one year ago


second

seconds (plural)
s (alternative)
sec (alternative)
s (alternative)
sec (alternative)
arcsec (alternative)

From Middle English secunde, seconde, borrowed from Old French seconde, from Medieval Latin secunda, short for secunda pars minuta (“second diminished part (of the hour)”).

A unit of time historically and commonly defined as a sixtieth of a minute which the International System of Units more precisely defines as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of caesium-133 in a ground state at a temperature of absolute zero and at rest.

асекунда

one-sixtieth of a minute; SI unit of time


century

/ˈsɛnt͡ʃʊɹi/

From Middle English centurie (“a count of one hundred (of anything); a division of the Roman army; century; a division of land”), from Old French centurie, from Latin centuria, from centum (“one hundred”). The most common modern use is a shortening of century of years.

A political division of ancient Rome, meeting in the Centuriate Assembly.


millisecond

The suggestion that pulsars were rotating neutron stars was put forth independently by Thomas Gold and Franco Pacini in 1968, and was soon proven beyond reasonable doubt by the discovery of a pulsar with a very short (33-millisecond) pulse period in the Crab nebula.ᵂ

We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

2012 January 18, Robert L. Dorit, “Rereading Darwin”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 1, archived from the original on 2012-11-14, page 23:

The internal NES clock must accurately measure down to milliseconds for its games to work properly.

2023 December 1, Evelynn Kersting, “GAMES AND TIME”, in University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, page 11, archived from the original on 2025-06-06:

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻³ seconds. Symbol: ms


nanosecond

Since the tiny magnetic domains have to travel only submolecular distances, it is possible to read and write magnetic regions with different polarization as quickly as a single nanosecond — far faster than existing storage technologies.

2007 September 11, John Markoff, “Redefining the Architecture of Memory”, in The New York Times:

“We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little big shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange,” he said.

2023 March 26, Alex Hern, quoting Michael Kagan, “Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻⁹ seconds. Symbol: ns


picosecond

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻¹² seconds. Symbol: ps


era

[ˈɪə̯.ɹə ~ ˈɪː.ɹə]

[ˈi̞ə̯.ɹə ~ ˈiː.ɹə]

[ˈɛ̝.ɹə ~ ˈe̞ː.ɹə]

Borrowed from Late Latin aera. Sense 3 popularized by Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.

in my Taylor Swift era

(informal) An indefinite period of time in one’s life characterized by a particular interest.


moment

en-noun

moment (countable and uncountable, plural moments)

From Middle English moment, from Old French moment, from Latin mōmentum. Doublet of momentum and movement.

(historical, unit) A definite period of time, specifically one-tenth of a point, or one-fortieth or one-fiftieth of an hour.


microsecond

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-microsecond.wav

He'd be on her ass in a microsecond, revoke her letters testamentary, they'd call her names, proclaim her through all Orange County as a redistributionist and pinko, slip the old man from Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus in as administrator de bonis non and so much baby for code, constellations, shadow-legatees.

1966 March, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 6, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, published November 1976, →ISBN, page 136:

The data word processor 606 handles the in-flow and out-flow of byte-oriented input/output data and interleaved signals at a rate of, for example, 500 kilobytes per second. Instruction processing rates of four to eight per microsecond are required for such a data flow.

1969, Harold R. Dell, HIGH-DENSITY PERMANENT DATA STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, US Patent 3638185:

O₂^(•−) and OH^• are highly unstable (half-life at the level of microseconds and nanoseconds, respectively) and cannot cross membrane, while H₂O₂, though not a free radical but a ROS, is relatively stable (half-life around 1 ms) (Møller et al. 2007) and can cross membranes through aquaporins.

2015, Rup Kumar Kar, “ROS Signaling: Relevance with Site of Production and Metabolism of ROS”, in Dharmendra K. Gupta, José M. Palma, Francisco J. Corpas, editors, Reactive Oxygen Species and Oxidative Damage in Plants Under Stress, Springer, →ISBN, page 117:

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻⁶ seconds. Symbol: μs It is commonly represented with symbol µs.


femtosecond

Sheldon Cooper: My hair is growing at the rate of 4.6 yoctometers per femtosecond.

2012, Mark Cendrowski, The Big Bang Theory, Season 5, Episode 18, "The Werewolf Transformation"

The observation and manipulation of electron dynamics in matter call for attosecond light pulses, routinely available from high-order harmonic generation driven by few-femtosecond lasers.

2017, D. E. Rivas, A. Borot, D. E. Cardenas, G. Marcus, X. Gu, D. Herrmann, J. Xu, J. Tan, D. Kormin, G. Ma, W. Dallari, G. D. Tsakiris, I. B. Földes, S.-w. Chou, M. Weidman, B. Bergues, T. Wittmann, H. Schröder, P. Tzallas, D. Charalambidis, O. Razskazovskaya, V. Pervak, F. Krausz, L. Veisz, “Next Generation Driver for Attosecond and Laser-plasma Physics”, in Scientific Reports, volume 7, →DOI:

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻¹⁵ seconds. Symbol: fs


attosecond

I can think at the speed of light, I can perceive events that last for less than an attosecond, I can run faster than time. What do I see when I run across the country, Superman? I see everything. And everyone.

Given the scales on which technology has operated in the first quarter of the 21st century, from lasers that flash for just a few attoseconds to the total amount of digital data in the world pushing past 160 zettabytes, it feels as if we may have let things lie for too long. I don't know if the future will have quettabit computer networks or rontometer-scale wormholes, but I'm pretty sure the large and small of it will be hella weird.

2023 January 10, Adam Rogers, “Move over, megatons”, in Business Insider:

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻¹⁸ seconds. Symbol: as


zeptosecond

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻²¹ seconds. Symbol: zs


yoctosecond

(metrology) An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻²⁴ seconds. Symbol: ys


sennight

sennights (plural)
se'nnight (alternative)
se'night (alternative)

From Middle English senight, senyght, sinight (“seven days or nights, a week”) [and other forms], a shortened form of seven-night, sevenight, sevenyght [and other forms], from Late Old English seofeniht, seoueniht (compare seofonnihte (“seven days old; seven days long”, adjective)), from seofon (“seven”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *septḿ̥ (“seven”)) + niht (“night; day (when computing spans of time)”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts (“night”)). Doublet of sevennight.

nb...

(Late Middle English) sennet, sennyght, sennyȝt, sennyt, senyte, synyght, (Late Middle English, Northern England) sennett, (Middle English) senit, senite, (Northern England) senne

sefennahht, sefnight, sefniht, seovenyght, seueniht, seuenist, seueniȝht, seue niȝt, seueniȝt, seue-niȝt, seueniȝth, seuenyght, seuenyghte, seuenyȝe, seue-nyȝt, seuenyȝth, seuenyȝtte, seuenynt, seuenyst, seuenyth, seuenyþe, sevenyghte, sevennyghtt, sevenyht, sevenyth, sevenyȝt, sevenyȝth, (North or West Midlands) sefenneghte, (Southwest Midlands) seveniþt, (Early Middle English) seue nigt, (Early Middle English, Southwest Midlands) seoue nicht, seoueniht, seoue niht, soueniht, (Early Middle English, Southwestern England) seoueniht, seoueniþt, soueniht, soueniþt, soueniȝt, souenyȝt

It will be in my power to assure him that her ladyship was quite well yesterday se'nnight.

1813 January 27, [Jane Austen], chapter XVIII, in Pride and Prejudice: […], volume I, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC, page 224:

I was snowed up at a friend's house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter. I went for only one night, and could not get away till that very day se'nnight.

1815 December (indicated as 1816), [Jane Austen], chapter XIII, in Emma: […], volume I, London: […] [Charles Roworth and James Moyes] for John Murray, →OCLC, page 244:

We leave Bath, as she has perhaps told you, on Saturday se'nnight.

1803 (date written), [Jane Austen], chapter II, in Northanger Abbey; published in Northanger Abbey: And Persuasion. […], volume I, London: John Murray, […], 20 December 1817 (indicated as 1818), →OCLC, pages 26–27:

As for his marriage with the Lady Margaret, fixed though it was for this day sennight, the thing was so palpably absurd that he scarcely gave it a thought.

1928, Virginia Woolf, chapter 1, in Orlando: A Biography, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, page 50:

(attributively) Preceded by a specified day such as Sunday, today, or yesterday: a week from (either before or after) the specified day.


halfmonth

(loosely) A fortnight, a period of time equal to two weeks; fourteen days.


nanofortnight

Holonyms: millifortnight < fortnight

(humorous) A period of time equal to one billionth of a fortnight, or exactly 1.2096 milliseconds.


millifortnight

Holonym: fortnight

Meronym: nanofortnight

(humorous) A period of time equal to one thousandth of a fortnight, which is exactly 1209.6 seconds, or about 20 minutes.


nanocentury

From nano- (“1 billionth”) + century (“100 years”).

prefix

(humorous) A unit of time equal to one billionth of a century or approximately 3.156 seconds.