Other forms: anniversaries
An anniversary is the same date coming round again, a year or many years after something happened. Your wedding anniversary, with the table booked and the card bought late.
It nearly always takes OF: the anniversary of the accident, the anniversary of her death, the anniversary of the day they met. Numbers go in front as ordinals — their tenth anniversary, the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. An anniversary is not only for happy things; countries hold them for battles and disasters too. Your birthday is technically the anniversary of your birth, but nobody says that, so keep anniversary for weddings, deaths, openings and other events. The named ones are worth knowing: silver is twenty-five years, golden is fifty, diamond is sixty.
1nounanniversaryThe date on which something happened in an earlier year, marked each time it comes round.~88%
“Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day they met.”
2nouncelebrationA celebration held on that date.~12%
“The company threw a party for its hundredth anniversary.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 25 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
anniversary is a date in the calendar.
Anniversary comes from Medieval Latin anniversaria, from anniversarius, meaning yearly. That is annus, year, joined to vertere, to turn. The word is a picture of the year turning right round and arriving back at the same day.
Medieval Latin
anniversāria
Middle English
anniversary
English, today
anniversary
Built from
From Middle English anniversary, from Medieval Latin anniversāria, anniversārium, from anniversārius (“yearly”), from annus (“year”) + versus, past participle of vertere (“to turn”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA