Other forms: years
A year is twelve months — the time the earth takes to travel once round the sun. Last year, a year ago, in three years.
There are several kinds: the calendar year, the academic year, the tax year and the financial year, and they start on different dates, which is a permanent source of confusion. A leap year has an extra day. Note year in, year out, meaning repeatedly over a long time; donkey's years, meaning a very long time; and that this year and last year need no preposition while in 2019 does.
1nounyearTwelve months; the time the earth takes to circle the sun.~98%
“The whole project took about a year longer than planned.”
2nounperiodA period of study or work with its own start date.~2%
“The academic year begins in the last week of September.”
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.
year is a period of time.
Old English gear descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning a season or a cycle, related to Greek horos and behind the word hour at a great distance. The year is one of the oldest measured things in the language.
Proto-Indo-European
*(H)yeh₁-
Middle English
yeer
English, today
year
From Middle English yeer. From Middle English yeer, yere, from Old English ġēar (“year”), from Proto-West Germanic jār, from Proto-Germanic jērą (“year”), from Proto-Indo-European yóh₁r̥ (“year, spring”). a doublet of hora and hour. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA