Well don’t I just feel stupid. Thanks.
forbids himself from ever speaking again because people could probably figure it out
At least i’m not the first, anyway.
Also wanted to throw in this discussion on the same subject (only books intead) in 1996, where they reached the same conclusions. Someone mentioned they had seen two books referred to as a “double-decker”. And of course I can rest easy knowing i’m not a complete moron.
In an article in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Niall Ferguson used the word “dichotomy” as a corrolary word to “tryptych.” I’d vote for “two-part (or volume) series,” myself, though.
I guess I read too much sf or maybe rasfw, but I’ve heard (and probably used) the term duology for a long time. I see nothing wrong with it and didn’t even realize it wasn’t in the dictionary until reading this thread.
The complaint about mixing Latin and Greek roots is silly. These morphemes have been borrowed into English and we’ll mix and match them however we damn well please.
A few items: [ul]
[]Two items are too few to make a list, so maybe they’re too few to make a series. []On the “four books” question, the Ender’s Game series (4 books) has been billed as the “Ender Quartet” Hi Opal![/ul]
Well, that’s not quite right, as dichotomy has a bit of a different meaning, and is usually not used to describe a type of two-part painting. As toadspittle said, diptych is the correct (and fairly common around people knowledgeably in arts) term. I’m surprised that Ferguson would use it as a parallel to triptych. Presumably, he’d know better.
A bipole?
How about Doublet and quartet for 2 and 4 respectively.
Ah, but without such standards we would never know if a pedophile was a child molester or a foot fetishist!
But without renegades like dtilque we wouldn’t have television!
Yes, “duology” would be the linguistically consistent term, from Greek “dyo, duo” and “logos”. So the terms for an n-part series, depending on the value of n, would be
Duology
Trilogy
Tetralogy
Pentalogy
and so forth.
Why insist on being able to mix Latin and Greek roots at will? Why not just keep the usage linguistically consistent when coining new words like “duology”? It’s more logical and makes it easier for people who know the roots to understand the new words.
My favorite mixed-roots story: a bathing-suit catalogue that sold “topless bikinis”. To prevent the clientele noticing that the item was simply half a bikini bathing suit and thus ought to cost no more than half the bikini price, they coined a new word:
Monokini.
That’s right, they pretended that the Polynesian word “bikini” was composed with the Latin prefix “bi” meaning “two” (which I’m not complaining about; I think that was kind of clever, actually), and then replaced it with the Greek prefix “mono” meaning “one”! Aargh! Of course, the item in question should have been called a…
(…figured it out?..)
Unikini. 
“Dilogy” can be found in the OED. Basically, it meant “doublespeak.” I don’t have it at hand, but I believe that it was listed as “obsolete.”
Doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be reused, though.
But what about someone who molests children’s feet?
Nor automobiles, motorcycles, or bicycles…