Noun
1. an amount of time;
"a time period of 30 years""hastened the period of time of his recovery""Picasso's blue period"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"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"--Aristotle6. 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"7. a unit of geological time during which a system of rocks formed;
"ganoid fishes swarmed during the earlier geological periods"8. the end or completion of something;
"death put a period to his endeavors""a change soon put a period to my tranquility"