period (
http://definr.com/period)
n 1: an amount of time; "a time period of 30 years"; "hastened
the period of his recovery" [syn:
time period, {period
of time}]
2: one of three periods of play in hockey games
3: a stage in the history of a culture having a definable place
in space and time; "a novel from the Victorian period"
[syn:
historic period,
historical period]
4: the interval taken to complete one cycle of a regularly
repeating phenomenon
5: a time of life characterized as a distinct phase; "Picasso's
blue period"; "it was the happy period of my life"
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,
catamenia,
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:
point, {full
stop},
stop,
full point]
8: a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks
formed; "ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier
geological periods" [syn:
geological period]
9: the end or completion of something; "death put a period to
his endeavors"; "a change soon put a period to my
tranquility"