Talk:dekad

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Latest comment: 1 year ago by Soap
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I know the formatting is wrong and I did my best. If someone can fix the formatting so that it appears like a normal English entry, I would love that.

What I did right is getting this out of the Malay section where it clearly didnt belong. It may be no more than happenstance that this word exists in Malay, as I suspect it is either a fanciful respelling of decade with a new meaning or an unusual combination of the scientific prefix deka- "ten; set of ten" and the scientific abbreviation d "day". The best way forward would be to see if the word dekad exists in ANY language but english with this sense of "ten days (of rain)". Soap 21:09, 5 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

It is possible that the source of this word is a fanciful spelling of decade, as I said above, but that its use as a term is much older than meteorology .... in Egyptology, one term for a stretch of ten days is decan, and Wikipedia says that the term decade is also used.Soap 21:21, 7 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I missed a very obvious explanation ... this is a direct reborrowing from Greek δεκάς just like pentad and hebdomad are from πεντάς and ἑβδομάς. My "deka-d" theory seems very weak now, so I would say that one way or another the etymology is from δεκάς though we might not need a section for it. Soap 05:38, 29 August 2022 (UTC)Reply