period
     n 1: an amount of time; "a time period of 30 years"; "hastened
          the period of time of his recovery"; "Picasso's blue
          period" [syn: {time period}, {period of time}]
     2: one of three periods of play in hockey games
     3: a stage in the history of a culture having a definable place
        in space and time; "a novel from the Victorian period"
        [syn: {historic period}, {historical period}]
     4: the interval taken to complete one cycle of a regularly
        repeating phenomenon
     5: 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"--Hippocrates; "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"--Aristotle [syn: {menstruation},
         {menses}, {menstruum}, {catamenia}, {flow}]
     6: 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" [syn: {point}, {full
        stop}, {stop}, {full point}]
     7: a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks
        formed; "ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier
        geological periods" [syn: {geological period}]
     8: the end or completion of something; "death put a period to
        his endeavors"; "a change soon put a period to my
        tranquility"
Source: WordNet® 2.0