Fortnight

How to spell fortnight

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fortnight

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fortnight mean?

1. nounA period of fourteen days; two weeks.

Fortnight in a sentence

• The builders promised to finish the kitchen within a fortnight.

• She booked a fortnight in Spain to recover from the busy season.

Where does fortnight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fortnight is a worn-down contraction of the Old English phrase feowertiene niht, which meant literally 'fourteen nights'. Early Germanic peoples reckoned the passage of time by counting nights rather than days, so a span of two weeks was naturally described as a stretch of fourteen nights. Over many centuries the long phrase was crushed together and smoothed in speech until it became the single word we now spell fortnight, with the 'fort' carrying the sense of 'fourteen' and 'night' surviving from the original counting habit. The same night-counting instinct also gave English the older word 'sennight' for a week, that is 'seven nights', though that one has fallen out of use. Because the spelling no longer matches how we say it, learners often forget the silent 'gh' and the unstressed second syllable, both of which are simply leftovers from the medieval pronunciation. The word remains common in British and Commonwealth use but is comparatively rare in everyday American speech.

How the word is built

• fort- (from feowertiene: fourteen)
• night (the older count by nights)