Meaning of period in English

Noun
period
Etymology
late Middle English (denoting the time during which something, especially a disease, runs its course): from Old French periode, via Latin from Greek periodos‘orbit, recurrence, course’, from peri-‘around’ + hodos‘way, course’. The sense ‘portion of time’ dates from the early 17th century
Definitions
1. an amount of time
Examples
- « a time period of 30 years »
- « hastened the period of time of his recovery »
- « Picasso's blue period »
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
Examples
- « a novel from the Victorian period »
4. the interval taken to complete one cycle of a regularly repeating phenomenon
5. the monthly discharge of blood from the uterus of nonpregnant women from puberty to menopause
Examples
- « 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 »
6. a punctuation mark (.) placed at the end of a declarative sentence to indicate a full stop or after abbreviations
Examples
- « in England they call a period a stop »
7. a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks formed
Examples
- « ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier geological periods »
8. the end or completion of something
Examples
- « death put a period to his endeavors »
- « a change soon put a period to my tranquility »

Pronunciation