period
period (pĭrʹē-əd) noun
Abbr. per.
1. An interval of time characterized by the occurrence of a certain condition, event, or phenomenon: a period of economic prosperity.
2. An interval of time characterized by the prevalence of a specified culture, ideology, or technology: artifacts of the pre-Columbian period.
3. An interval regarded as a distinct evolutionary or developmental phase: Picasso's early career is divided into his blue period and rose period.
4. Geology. A unit of time, longer than an epoch and shorter than an era.
5. Any of various arbitrary units of time, especially: a. Any of the divisions of the academic day. b. Sports & Games. A division of the playing time of a game.
6. Physics & Astronomy. The time interval between two successive occurrences of a recurrent event or phases of an event; a cycle.
7. An instance or occurrence of menstruation.
8. A point or portion of time at which something is ended; a completion or conclusion.
9. The full pause at the end of a spoken sentence.
10. A punctuation mark ( . ) indicating a full stop, placed at the end of declarative sentences and other statements thought to be complete, and after many abbreviations.
11. A sentence of several carefully balanced clauses in formal writing.
12. a. A metrical unit of quantitative verse consisting of two or more cola. b. An analogous unit or division of classical Greek or Latin prose.
13. Music. A group of two or more phrases within a composition, made up of 8 or 16 measures and terminating with a cadence.
14. Mathematics. a. The least interval in the range of the independent variable of a periodic function of a real variable in which all possible values of the dependent variable are assumed. b. A group of digits separated by commas in a written number. c. The number of digits that repeat in a repeating decimal. For example, 1/7 = 0.142857142857 . . . has a six-digit period.
15. Chemistry. A sequence of elements arranged in order of increasing atomic number and forming one of the horizontal rows in the periodic table.
adjective
Of, belonging to, or representing a certain historical age or time: a period piece; period furniture.
[Middle English periode, from Old French, from Medieval Latin periodus, from Latin perihodos, rhetorical period, from Greek periodos, circuit : peri-, peri- + hodos, way.]
Synonyms: period, epoch, era, age, term. These nouns refer to a portion or length of time. Period is the most general: a short waiting period; one of the most difficult periods of her life; worked for a period of ten years; the Romantic period in music. Epoch refers to a period regarded as being remarkable or memorable: "We enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression" (John R. Green). An era is a period of time notable because of new or different aspects or events: "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book" (Henry David Thoreau). An age is usually a period marked by a particular distinctive characteristic: the age of Newton; the Iron Age. "These principles form the bright constellation which has . . . guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation" (Thomas Jefferson). A term is a period of time to which limits have been set: Senators are elected for a term of six years.
Word History: Perhaps more than once one may have wondered why the word period has the sense "punctuation mark ( . )" as well as some of its other senses having to do with time. The answer to this question lies in the senses of the Greek word periodos from which our word is descended. Periodos, made up of peri-,"around," and hodos,"way," meant such things as "going round, way round, going round in a circle, circuit," and with regard to time "cycle or period of time." The word also meant "the period of menstruation." In rhetoric it referred to "a group of words organically related in grammar and sense." The Greek word was adopted into Latin as perihodos with only its rhetorical sense and one other sense, but in Medieval Latin it reacquired senses it had in Greek, such as "cycle," and acquired a new sense, "a punctuation mark used at the end of a rhetorical period." Although this sense is recorded in Medieval Latin, it is not recorded in English until 1609. But the word period had entered Middle English from Medieval Latin and Old French, first being recorded in a work written around 1425 in the sense "a cycle of recurrence of a disease."