Word of the Day

: September 17, 2018

chiliad

noun KILL-ee-ad

What It Means

1 : a group of 1000

2 : a period of 1000 years; especially : one reckoned from the beginning of the Christian era

chiliad in Context

Erin's pursuit of an MD degree felt like it took a chiliad, but she achieved her goal and is now running her own pediatric clinic.

"While teachers may offer children some new vocab words, there are some at-home tricks parents can also use to make sure their children learn a chiliad of new words." — Herb Scribner, The Petoskey (Michigan) News-Review, 6 Sept. 2015

Did You Know?

What's the difference between a chiliad and a millennium? Not much: both are a period of 1000 years. While millennium is more widely used, chiliad is actually older. Chiliad first appeared in the late 1500s and was originally used to mean "a group of 1000," as in "a chiliad of arrows"; millennium didn't make its way into written English until some decades later, in the early 1600s. Not surprisingly, both words trace back to roots that mean "thousand." Millennium comes from Latin mille, and chiliad is a descendant of Greek chilioi.