eon
This is a length of time so long it’s impossible to fathom. The meaning of eon, a word that’s been found since the 1500s, has been relatively consistent, meaning either an endless, eternity-type period of time or a geological period, which is pretty long too, involving billions of years. You’re most likely to see this word in exaggerations such as “You’ve been yammering about Batman for eons” or “It’s been eons since I went for Indian food. What’s wrong with me?”
The skull was crushed eons ago during the fossilization process.
fortnight
This term meaning two weeks has been around a little longer than that, dating from the days of Old English. If you want to impress a time traveler from the days of yore, this is a great word to use. An even rarer old term, sennight, means one week.
The maximum penalty will be a fine or up to a fortnight in police custody.
yore
Speaking of yore, this is an old-fashioned word for old-fashioned times. “The days of yore” are the bygone, long-lost, age-old times that hardly anyone can remember but everyone loves to glorify.
It is a long way from the old groovy hippie days of yore.
halcyon
Just as people look wistfully back on days of yore, they yearn for their halcyon days, which are basically the good old days when everything was chocolate cake, everywhere and all the time. This word was originally the name of a Greek bird.
They spend their time sailing, playing tennis, and sometimes recalling the halcyon days of crossing the moors behind packs of beagles to hunt down rabbits.
millennium
This word for a thousand years was heard quite frequently about 17 years ago, as we shifted from one millennium to another. The original meaning of this word, much like our system of years, was distinctly Christian: it referred to a foretold 1000 years in which Christ would reign on earth, according to the Book of Revelations. As words tend to do, this one changed in meaning, coming to refer to any 1000-year period.
The wreck confirms that sea-based commerce between China and West Asia was thriving more than a millennium ago.
jubilee
A jubilee is an anniversary: usually the fiftieth anniversary. It’s a celebratory, joyous, wake-the-neighbors kind of word. Originally, this was a Jewish term that vividly described scenes of Hebrew slaves being freed, trumpets blasting across the land. These days, the word is far less specific, meaning pretty much any sort of celebration.
Large-scale jubilee celebrations are expected to be reserved for the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, when the monarch will mark 70 years.
contemporaneous
This is a word for things that happen at the same time: if you spill apple cider on your favorite shirt while Taylor Swift is hunting rabbits in an underground maze thousands of miles beneath the Earth’s surface, those events were contemporaneous. If you teach your cat to walk on a leash, and then sometime later the moon is revealed as a spy satellite for Martians, those events were non-contemporaneous. And also weird, but that’s another matter.
March Madness is about to begin, and Twitter will be stuffed full of contemporaneous commentary about the games being played.
advent
Technology also plays a huge role in the story - particularly with the advent of radio in the 1920s.
blue moon
“Every once in a blue moon a book captures the imagination, providing a portal into magical places unknown,” Google writes.
epoch
Not to be confused with epic, which is both a long narrative poem and an adjective which describes something surpassing the ordinary, epoch is a period of time — geologic, historical, or cultural — marked by certain characteristics.
Epochs demarcate time on the order of a few million years.
era
While the novel suffers at times from its adolescent tone, Jessica is a worthy heroine for our era.
perpetual
She walked in perpetual fear of tripping and falling, of breaking an ankle stepping into a pothole.
biannual
Our biannual clock-tuning is a slip of the mask, a glitch in the matrix that reminds us that clock time is always artificial and arbitrary.
biennial
His administration did not hold a routine press briefing of the governor’s last biennial budget, which was released late Friday.
chronological
It would allow doctors to search a patient's entire medical history in chronological order before they arrived at their bedside.
eternal
But then again, a hospital is a place where hope reliably springs eternal.
coeval
It was one of the first two inland settlements of the colony, being coeval with Concord.
phase
Aid groups warned on Friday that the most dangerous phase of the offensive was about to begin.
interval
The action is repeated at two-hour intervals throughout the day and evening.
perennial
One of the perennial questions for rock fans is which is the most important year in its history?
