Antentwig is a term used by Mike Pesca on Slate’s “The Gist” podcast to refer to a 3-week period. He claims that it is an old word, like fortnight for a 2-week period, but one that is no longer in use.
However, I cannot find any reference in the OED or anywhere on the great interwebs to this word (in any spelling I try) or to its origin, that does not reference Mike Pesca and The Gist.
Can anyone confirm or point to a reference for this word - or is Pesca pulling a fast one?
-J
Antentwig is a perfectly cromulent word.
BOOM! First!
More seriously, it’s not on Phrontistery, and if it’s really not in the OED either, the odds are pretty good he’s just making it up.
Yeah, it’s not in the online OED either. I’d be curious if anyone has a possible etymology for it because based on my rudimentary knowledge of latin, greek and old english/germanic, I’m not seeing how it could mean 3 weeks.
“Vingt-et-un” is French for ‘21.’ That’s the closest I can come up with.
Well, if you search “books” on Google, rather than the web, you do get one hit on “Old English Grammar” by A. Campbell:
Presumably, it occurs in the book somewhere. If it’s Old English, and is not the root of anything surviving into middle or modern English, the OED might not have it. And if it’s Old English, Pesca might have Romanized the orthography.
Nothing referring to a three-week period appears in Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English, as far as I can tell from my copy. I thought that might have been a likely source, but no such luck. Kacirk has a daily email (which I don’t subscribe to), so maybe it was something he sent out at some point.
Pesca seems like an agreeable guy on the radio. Maybe you can contact him and ask?
Maybe we should contact the Lexicon Valley people and sick them on him.
I assumed my own failure to find the word was due to my uncertainty about its spelling. Dictionary.com, often a good place for a quick etymological summary, doesn’t do a very good job guessing what word I might mean in ordinary cases.
Interesting find, but there’s no way to know how Campbell uses that word, or if it’s a typo, or in another language. There’s no hit in the 1983 revision of the same book, which is the only version still for sale. In fact, Google Books is the only online evidence I can find that the 1971 edition existed at all, and they don’t even have a picture of the cover.
So maybe the ‘wig’ part at the end is the word week. Is there any word similar to ‘antent’ that would mean three?
I like the way you guys roll! Thanks for checking your own fav sources and for the musings. FWIW I have emailed The Gist and asked about the origins of the word. If I hear anything I’ll let you know. Twitter would probably be a better way to reach Pesca, but I’m not a twitter user. If anyone else would care to send him a tweet, please be my guest. Cheers.
-J
How often would anyone even need to refer to a 3 week period?
You can’t presume this. In my experience, searches on Google Books will often return books which don’t contain the exact search term, but which are indirectly related to the search term. I can’t find any official documentation on exactly what method they use to determine this relatedness, though I strongly suspect that one way is for the book to be cited by a different book which does use the search term.
Dmitri Borgmann’s Beyond Language has an entry dealing with obscure time units. If there’s a word in English denoting a three-week period, there’s a very good chance that it’s in there. I don’t have a copy of the book any more, though someone who does might want to check. According to the book’s index, this should be covered in the resolution to Problem 114.
Just checked it. It doesn’t have a term for a three-week period. The closest is one for 20 days (uinal), but that’s a term from the Mayan calendar and not relevant to this question.
The word looks Dutch to me.
Some Googling reveals that the term “sesquifortnightly” has been used in print and on the Web to denote something occuring once every three weeks. So even if “antentwig” turns out to be bogus, you could always use “sesquifortnight” instead. 
Ha! I know someone who is currently undergoing antentwig chemo treatments.
I did get a reply from Mike Pesca! Here is the email exchange with him…
Me:
Mike, I like your antentwig segment, and I like the word. But apart from you, I can find no other reference to said word anywhere. I’m wondering if you can provide any more info on the origins of antentwig. Thanks.
-J
Mike:
Sure. I invented the word.
So there you have it. Greg Charles, you win. First answer, correct answer.
-J
And it only took a fortnight from the OP to get an official answer. I guess the word isn’t very useful after all.