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Does a word exist in the English language to mean "every EIGHT weeks", like biweekly for every two weeks, and triweekly for every three weeks, etc.?

Decapitated Soul
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Erik Raymond Baity
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    Does this answer your question? "Biweekly", "bimonthly", "biannual", and "bicentennial" The answer to 'Is there a recognised word meaning "occurring exactly once every 56 days"?' is NO. One sense of 'bimonthly' comes close, but 'month' is ill-defined. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 26 '21 at 15:24
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    Why do people think English has a single word for anything that can be described, and that English speakers will understand all of them? There's no single word, though you're at liberty to make up one that nobody else will understand if you want. – John Lawler Jan 26 '21 at 15:38
  • I think that concept is rare enough that it doesn't have a commonly accepted word for it. 'Octoweekly' would be the logical construction but it sounds pretty weird. – Mitch Jan 26 '21 at 15:58
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    If I were being silly, I might say, "We're going to meet octoweekly." But everyone in the room would know I was making it up, and it'd be worse than the time I said, "It's 13 till 6." – TaliesinMerlin Jan 26 '21 at 19:29
  • At once per 56 days the precise frequency is 1/4838400 hertz or about 207 nanohertz. – user662852 Jan 26 '21 at 19:52
  • @JohnLawler German has lots of words - ostensibly single entities - but which are in fact more than one word joined together. This practice exists to a limited degree in English - such as weekend, which is written as a single word. But we have nothing to compare with Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung - a 41-letter word meaning "a regulation requiring a prescription for an anaesthetic". They probably have one for "once every eight weeks" but as I do not speak German I have no idea what it might be. – WS2 Jan 27 '21 at 09:46
  • Of course Welsh is something else - as the village name Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch will attest. It means "St Mary's church of the pool of the white hazels over against the pool of St Tysilio Gogo [Tysilio of the cave]" - though it arguably was contrived as recently as 1869 in order to give the village's ailway station the longest name in the British Isles. – WS2 Jan 27 '21 at 09:53
  • It's easy to write compounds with or without spaces (the spaces are silent, so both ways represent the way it's pronounced equally well, and equally badly). There's no space in speech, however, and word zgot ogether in all kindsa ways. That doesn't really deal with the issue of word length, which is usually due to phonotactics; that's the reason why Japanese and Hawai'ian have such long words -- they don't have many syllables available to distinguish words, so they have to stackemup bigly. – John Lawler Jan 27 '21 at 15:13

2 Answers2

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You can make a compound out of a number and period suffixed '-ly'. Four-hourly, two-weekly, six-monthly, five-yearly.

Eight-weekly intravenous antibiotics is beneficial in severe bronchiectasis

National Library of Medicine

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The time commitment for all of these positions will involve six-weekly meetings of both the Labour Group Executive and the main Labour Group Councillors

to organise the logistics of their six-weekly meetings, ensuring that everyone gets to everywhere they need to go across their visits

Michael Harvey
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  • There seem few examples if one filters out 'intravenous' etc, and the actual stipulating definitions seem to switch (eg 'Eight-weekly intravenous antibiotics [8-week interval between the end of one IV antibiotic course and start of the next IV antibiotic course]'). And from personal experience, these courses are often tweaked. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 26 '21 at 19:43
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bimonthly, though it can be confusing:

Bimonthly is one of a group of confusing words (including biweekly and biannually) that have two meanings. You can use bimonthly to mean both "twice a month" and "every two months." The roots of the word are the Latin bi-, "twice" or "double," and monthly. (Vocabulary.com)

You might need to clarify the meaning in your context. Consider this example given by Cambridge:

The magazine is published bimonthly, with six issues a year.

As alternatives, WordHippo gives every other month or every two months. Every 8 weeks looks over explicit.

Gngram seems to give preference to bimonthly.

fev
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