Everyday LifeGreek → English
Period
/ˈpɪəriəd/noun
A stretch of time with a beginning and an end.
The Greek roots
περί
perí
around
ὁδός
hodós
way, road
Literally: “way around”
The story of the word
A περίοδος is a circuit: the lap a runner covers, the orbit a planet completes, the loop a sentence makes before it closes. The rhetorical sense reached English first, a period being one full rounded sentence, which is why American English calls the mark at its end a period. Medicine kept the circuit for the monthly cycle and astronomy for orbital period, and all three hold the same idea of coming back round.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- early 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
periodicodometerexodusmethodsynod
In a sentence
For a short period in 1978 the factory ran three shifts.
Jupiter has an orbital period of just under twelve years.