Additionally, your employees will be happy to be paid more often (as opposed to monthly or semimonthly). When you pay employees every other week, this is considered bi-weekly pay. Payday is typically the same day of the week, such as a Wednesday or Friday for a pay period that ended the previous week. For full-time hourly workers, each paycheck accounts for roughly 80 work hours. Some wages and salaries are paid on a fortnightly basis; however, in North America it is far more common to use the term biweekly.
In other languages
Understanding biweekly vs weekly paycheck and biweekly pay vs monthly salary is essential for payroll discussions. Many businesses prefer biweekly payments because they offer a balance between weekly and monthly pay schedules. The extra two paychecks for biweekly pay frequencies can set your business back if you don’t properly prepare for months with three paychecks. You will need to make sure you have enough money in your payroll account to cover the additional expenses. You need to consider how many employees you have and whether those employees are hourly or salaried. Many employees prefer a biweekly pay vs monthly salary structure because they receive more frequent payments.
How to say biweekly in sign language?
I’m looking particularly because some of my colleagues speak English only as a second language, and find fortnightly difficult to remember. There’s also the (not so commonly used) prefix “sesqui”, from Latin, that implies “1 and half times”. Furthermore, in the above examples, biweekly is an adjective that describes a noun. It is called biweekly, meaning something that happens every two weeks. Biweekly means twice a week or once every other week, though it’s more commonly used to refer to the latter.
- This might sound simple, but that means for two months out of the year, you’ll have three pay periods instead of two.
- She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo.
- So while most people use it to mean once every two weeks, both definitions are grammatically correct.
- To avoid confusion, it’s best to clarify the intended meaning when using bi-weekly.
- I don’t think words have devolved, I think people, specifically our literacy and attention to detail have devolved.
- “That’s the result of fortnight being an old English word so well established historically that people saw no reason to use biweekly to mean every two weeks,” Adams said.
Princeton’s WordNetRate these synonyms:4.0 / 1 vote
If you use words like triweekly, you will just confuse everyone. Even if their interpretation of the word is correct, they will be unable to rely on your interpretation also being correct and matching theirs. For instance, a “fortnightly” event would occur every 2 weeks/14 days. In terms of meaning, the word biweekly can be a bit ambiguous because of the two meanings.
What is another word for biweekly?
Payroll processing for biweekly hourly employees is straightforward; however, processing for semimonthly hourly employees can get confusing. For biweekly hourly employees, simply pay the employee according to the number of hours he worked over the past two weeks. For semimonthly hourly employees, to avoid confusion, most employers give employees a payroll calendar, which shows when semimonthly time cards should be submitted for each pay period.
a periodical that is published twice a week or every two weeks (either 104 or 26 issues per year)
Semi- can always mean bi- but bi- may not necessarily imply semi-. Biweekly is the most common option for a business’s pay period in the U.S. Biweekly pay means you pay your employees on a set day once every two weeks, resulting in 26 paychecks per year. Since some months have 31 days and others have 30, a semimonthly hourly employee may sometimes receive payment for different number of days.
There are 52 weeks in a calendar year, meaning that people paid on a biweekly basis receive 26 paychecks per year. Understanding the correct usage ensures clear communication in schedules, payments, or publications. Whether you prefer biweekly or bi-weekly, consistency matters to prevent misunderstandings in professional and everyday conversations.
Biweekly means both, but most American English speakers use it to refer to something occurring every other week or twice monthly. Biannual is more straightforward, as it’s only used to mean twice a year. In this case, the prefix bi- us is used to mean “occurring twice.” Use the word biennial to describe events occurring once every two years.
Understanding Biweekly or Bi-Weekly
In Urdu, biweekly or bi weekly can be translated as “ہر دو ہفتے” (har do hafte) if it means every two weeks. biweekly synonym If it means twice a week, you can say “ہفتے میں دو بار” (hafte mein do baar). Since biweekly has two meanings, it’s better to clarify which one you mean. The term bi-weekly was created by adding a hyphen to biweekly.
- The different definitions have left people — even the ones working at dictionaries — scratching their heads for a long time.
- Semimonthly means your employees get paid on two specific days of the month, regardless of when they fall.
- Most states have payday laws, which mandate how often employees should be paid.
It is sometimes used for meetings held once every two years. There are three times as many Google hits for semi-annual as bi-annual, so that could indicate a lack of confidence in using bi-. Use fortnightly for “once every two weeks”, and twice a week for, well, “twice a week”. We can use fortnightly to indicate once every two weeks and help disambiguate that way. Are there any other words we could use which could help, particularly words which mean “twice a week”?
As the following examples show, the other words in the sentence indicate which of the two meanings biweekly has. For example, an employee making $40,000 annually will make $19.23 an hour under a bi-weekly payroll system (($40,000/26)/80) but only $18.73 per hour bi-monthly (($40,000/24)/89). I detect a fair bit of frustration in the posts being tossed about here and it certainly will not end with this thread. In payroll, biweekly typically means every two weeks, while in general use, it can also mean twice a week. No, biweekly meaning in English strictly refers to something occurring every two weeks ortwice a week.