Millennium

How to spell millennium

10 letters · 4 syllables

The most common mistake is millenium. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

millenium millennium

What people typed instead

• millenium8 people

How to pronounce millennium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does millennium mean?

1. nounA period of one thousand years, or the point marking the start of a new thousand-year span.

Millennium in a sentence

• A millennium is a thousand years.

• We celebrated the new millennium in style.

• These traditions go back a millennium.

Where does millennium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin mille, meaning 'thousand', joined to annus, meaning 'year', so it literally describes a span of a thousand years. The form was coined in the seventeenth century by analogy with biennium 'a period of two years' and triennium 'a period of three years', all of which take the Latin -ium ending for a stretch of time. The spelling trap lives in those doubled letters: the double L belongs to mille, while the double N comes from annus, since the A of annus was absorbed when the two roots were fused. The same annus survives in the everyday words 'annual' and 'anniversary', which is a useful reminder that the year part of millennium needs two N's. English took up the word particularly in religious contexts, where it described a prophesied thousand-year reign, before it broadened into the ordinary calendar sense.

How the word is built

• mille (Latin: thousand)
• ann/enn (Latin annus: year)
• -ium (noun suffix)