The good news is it won't take us two weeks to answer. Just ask the countless parents and partners who have no idea what it is, exactly, their loved ones are doing in the basement. But, lexically speaking, we think she really does ask a good question: What even is a fortnight , anyways? It actually explains that confusing fort- in fortnight —which has nothing to do with army forts or pillow forts. Can you guess what the sen- in sennight means? But, words like sennight and fortnight appear to be a leftover from ancient Germanic calendars, which were known to reckon time not by days—but by nights.
To many speakers of American English, a fortnight sounds like it comes from a time long ago—perhaps even when fur-clad warriors huddled before fires at night within forts built out of tall, wooden pikes. Winterfell, anyone? But, fortnight is very useful, which is why it still has currency in British English and other forms of English around the world.
Consider the words biweekly and bimonthly. See the full definition for fortnight in the English Language Learners Dictionary.
Nglish: Translation of fortnight for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of fortnight for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!
Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of fortnight. Examples of fortnight in a Sentence Recent Examples on the Web For a fortnight in Glasgow, delegates from nearly countries will argue back and forth over the great energy transition—over the political and practical challenges of shifting the world from fossil fuels to renewables. Dropped out: First Known Use of fortnight before the 12th century, in the meaning defined above. Learn More About fortnight.
Time Traveler for fortnight The first known use of fortnight was before the 12th century See more words from the same century. First prize is a fortnight in Barbados and second prize is a weekend in Rome. We spent a fortnight in Rome looking at all the sights. He has secured a fortnight's work experience at a firm of solicitors. Specific periods of time. Related word fortnightly. Examples of fortnight. A fortnight later, the correspondent discovered that the man and child were recovering but that another child had died from fever.
From the Cambridge English Corpus. It is only being released in the interest of public debate and discussion during the much-touted ' organic fortnight '. Each sample prepared was discarded after a fortnight. Recordings were made once every fortnight , on average. While flying time might be 90 minutes, the cost can represent a fortnight's pension income, in approximate terms. This area was visited a fortnight later when the vegetation was springing up.
Due to widespread protest, the ban was lifted after a fortnight. But where did this game that spellbinds us for a fortnight come from? The figure clearly reveals that sampling at weekly intervals resulted in less error than sampling on two consecutive nights per fortnight. Every fortnight the musicians meet to plan the programme for the following two weeks. Their daily nausea levels were assessed for a fortnight using a simple questionnaire and an anti-emetic tablet count.
Her detailed examination of the scant surviving private sources indicates regular use, roughly once a fortnight. And at present, an unrecorded language is dying somewhere in the world every fortnight or so.
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