In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb: Beware the Ides of March! Time-Related Words for March 15

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.