Sport & ContestGreek → English
Olympiad
/əˈlɪmpiæd/noun
The four-year span between Olympic Games, or a staging of the Games themselves.
The Greek roots
Ὀλυμπιάς
Olympiás
four-year Olympic period
Literally: “an Olympia-interval”
Follow a root:Ὀλυμπιάς1 word
The story of the word
Greeks dated history by them. Historians wrote things like "in the third year of the 87th Olympiad", counting from 776 BC, and it gave a scattered set of independent cities their one shared calendar. The modern Olympiad is again a fixed four-year block, so the Games cancelled in 1916, 1940 and 1944 still consumed their numbers. That is why Tokyo 2020, held in 2021, remained the Games of the XXXII Olympiad.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
OlympicOlympianOlympus
In a sentence
The city has been bidding for an Olympiad since the 1990s.
Her whole career fitted inside two Olympiads.