Does that mean twice a month or every 2 months?
Bi-monthly means every two months. Semi-monthly is twice a month.
It could be either. Don’t use that word; just say every two months or twice a month.
There’s a dozen more dictionaries saying the same thing.
Bimonthly actually means every other month, but general usage is that it means twice a month and most people use it that way. However, if you do use it, be warned that pendantic members of of a particular Grammar-Socialist organization will try to correct you.
Merriam-Webster at least are completely useless on this type of issue. They’ve gone in hard on the descriptivist position so many times that it’s not worth listening to anything they say.
(Emphasis added) I would revise your first phrase to something like “The etymologically-derived meaning of bimonthly is every other month.” The word “actually” implies correctness, an attitude which is in direct contradiction to your second sentence.
Also I’m not as sure as you are that “most people” use it to mean twice a month. Definitely some people do.
(Provided for your enjoyment, an example of annoying pedantry that is not from a grammar Nazi.)
All of us Dopers are just hanging around, but some of us enjoy correcting other people’s spelling mistakes.
I don’t disagree with you here (that some dictionaries are more descriptivist than others). But isn’t that kinda the point here?
“What does bi-monthly mean?” Sure, you could answer that with “etymologically, it means this…” or “this prescriptivist dictionary says this…”, but at the end of the day, different people you say that word to are going to have different understandings of it.
Words that introduce ambiguity are interesting in the linguistic sense, but in everyday conversation, it’s more pragmatic just to be clear and say “twice a month” or “every two months”.
There is no “winning” a debate about prescriptivism vs descriptivism. But as a pragmatic answer to a factual question, I’d argue the meaning of “bi-monthly” very much depends on who you ask.
I have never kept track of that kind of stuff, but I am positive I have heard things described as “biweekly”.
Heh, as the descriptivist MW article notes, that could also mean either “twice a week” or “every two weeks”.
I suggest we start using the word “bidaily” just to add to the pool of confusion, like “I am a civilized gentleman who bidets bidaily!”
I’ve seen people use bi-monthly to mean twice a month but I wouldn’t say I observe that usage “generally”. Perhaps “not uncommonly” but not generally.
That’s even more different. In a given year, there’s 26 bi-weekly periods (plus 1 day left over) vs 24 semi-monthly periods and I’ve had to explain to co-workers the difference - I was at a place that paid bonuses on the last paycheck of a month, and they didn’t realize bi-weekly pay periods meant there were occasionally 3 pay checks during a calendar month.
If you want to be old school, you do it like the Brits and say “fortnightly”, which unambiguously means “once every two weeks” (and is thus almost, though not quite, the same thing as “twice a month”).
So therefore "bisexual means…
(Sorry)
I think part of it is that you would generally have to be more specific about something that occurs twice a month. E.g. is that every two weeks or once at the beginning of the month and once at the end of the month or something elese?
This argument was shot, stabbed, poisoned, electrocuted, and disemboweled in 1961. No matter how many times doubters try to zombify (something that lacks vitality and independent thought) it into a new life, it remains deader than a doornail.
I’m a serials cataloging librarian, which means I create bibliographic records for serial publications–that’s things like magazines, journals, newspapers, and the like.
We record the frequency of a given publication. In the world of serials cataloging, “bimonthly” is defined to mean “Every two months,” while “semimonthly” is defined to mean “Twice a month.”
In specialized fields such as mine, you may get official definitions like this. In general usage, it’s much more dependent on the particular user. Not much to do about that, other than to use more precise terminology when such things are important.
The descriptivist position is the only position. If a large number of people mean the same thing when they say a particular word, then there’s no meaningful sense in which the word can be said to not “really” mean that. The only meaning words ever have is the meaning they’re intended to have by the people who use them.
What’s your take on languages that have an official prescriptive language authority, eg French? Académie Française - Wikipedia
Governments and official bodies listen to them, but I’m not sure if the average person there gives a damn.
It’s certainly the only useful position in this case. If you see the word “bimonthly” outside of very narrow circumstances, you don’t have enough information to know when the next meeting is. And Merriam Webster let’s you know that you need more info.
I do not know if people give a damn, but schools and such use the official dictionaries, so they have a lot of influence, even if they may also encounter resistance.