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say it: PIR-ee-uhd
period is a noun meaning "an amount of time". It carries 7 recorded senses.
an amount of time
“a time period of 30 years”
“hastened the period of time of his recovery”
“Picasso's blue period”
the interval taken to complete one cycle of a regularly repeating phenomenon
(ice hockey) one of three divisions into which play is divided in hockey games
ice hockey
a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks formed
“ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier geological periods”
the end or completion of something
“death put a period to his endeavors”
“a change soon put a period to my tranquility”
trope
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”
“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”
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”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for period come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.