Link Centre Dictionary

period

pe·riod

UK/ˈpɪːɹɪjəd/ US/ˈpɪə.ɹi.əd/ common us

noun

1.

an amount of time

  • “a time period of 30 years”
  • “hastened the period of time of his recovery”
  • “Picasso”
Synonyms
2.

one of three periods of play in hockey games

3.

a stage in the history of a culture having a definable place in space and time

  • “a novel from the Victorian period”
Synonyms
4.
5.

the monthly discharge of blood from the uterus of nonpregnant women from puberty to menopause

  • “the women were sickly and subject to excessive menstruation”
  • “a woman does not take the gout unless her menses be stopped” -Hippocrates
  • “the semen begins to appear in males and to be emitted at the same time of life that the catamenia begin to flow in females” -Aristotle
Synonyms
6.

a punctuation mark (.) placed at the end of a declarative sentence to indicate a full stop or after abbreviations

  • “in England they call a period a stop”
Synonyms
7.

a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks formed

  • “ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier geological periods”
Synonyms
8.

the end or completion of something

  • “death put a period to his endeavors”
  • “a change soon put a period to my tranquility”

Origin

From Middle English periode, from Middle French periode, from Medieval Latin periodus, from Ancient Greek περίοδος (períodos, “circuit, orbit, a recurring interval of time, path around”), from περι- (peri-, “around”) + ὁδός (hodós, “way”).

Phrases

  • accounting period
  • Baroque period
  • Classical period
  • closed period
  • common practice period
  • contract period
  • cooling-off period
  • critical period

Related words

Word family

Broader terms

Narrower terms

Parts

Part of

WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.