Other forms: terms, termed
A term is a fixed stretch of time with a beginning and an end. The school term that runs from September to Christmas, a president's four-year term, a six-month prison term.
A term is also a word for something, especially a precise one: 'cardiac arrest' is the medical term, and a technical term is one you have to be taught. In the plural, terms are the conditions of a deal, so you agree to the terms, scroll past the terms and conditions, and push for better terms. Terms describes how people get along too: on good terms with the neighbours, not on speaking terms with a brother. In maths, each part of a sum is a term. And 'in terms of' means measured by, as in cheap in terms of money, expensive in terms of time.
1nountermOne of the periods that the school or university year is divided into.~9%
“We have three terms, and the summer term is the shortest.”
2nounfixedA fixed period during which something lasts.~26%
“He is serving a four-year term for fraud.”
3nounwordA word or phrase used for something, especially within a particular subject.~52%
“Engineers use the term latency for that delay.”
4nounconditionsThe conditions of an agreement or contract, used in the plural.~9%
“Nobody reads the terms before clicking accept.”
5nounstateThe state of a relationship between people, used in the plural.~2%
“They are on good terms again after years of silence.”
6verbnameTo call something by a particular name.~2%
“What the report terms an incident was in fact a fire.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
term is a fixed period of time.
Term goes back to Latin terminus, 'a bound, boundary, limit, end', which reached English through Old French terme and Middle English terme. Further back is Proto-Indo-European *termn, 'stump, end, boundary', a post driven in to mark where your land stopped. Terminus is its doublet, and every modern meaning still has an edge on it: the end of a school term, the limits of a contract, the exact boundary of a word.
Latin
terminus
Old French
terme
Middle English
terme
English, today
term
From Middle English terme, from Old French terme, from Latin terminus. From Middle English terme, borrowed from Old French terme, from Latin terminus (“a bound, boundary, limit, end; in Medieval Latin -, also a time, period, word, covenant, etc.”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European térmn̥ (“stump, end, boundary”). a doublet of terminus and termon. Old English - had termen, from the same source.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA