Period - Definition
period
n 1: an amount of time; "a time period of 30 years"; "hastened
the period of time of his recovery"; "Picasso's blue
period" [syn: time period, period of time, period]
2: the interval taken to complete one cycle of a regularly
repeating phenomenon
3: (ice hockey) one of three divisions into which play is
divided in hockey games
4: a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks
formed; "ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier geological
periods" [syn: period, geological period]
5: the end or completion of something; "death put a period to
his endeavors"; "a change soon put a period to my
tranquility"
6: the monthly discharge of blood from the uterus of nonpregnant
women from puberty to menopause; "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 appear in males and to be emitted at the same
time of life that the catamenia begin to flow in females"--
Aristotle [syn: menstruation, menses, menstruum,
catamenia, period, flow]
7: a punctuation mark (.) placed at the end of a declarative
sentence to indicate a full stop or after abbreviations; "in
England they call a period a stop" [syn: period, point,
full stop, stop, full point]