decamillennium

English

Alternative forms

• decimillennium

Etymology

From deca- +‎ millennium.

Noun

decamillennium (plural decamillennia or decamillenniums)

1. (rare) A period of time consisting of ten thousand years.

   Coordinate terms: annum, biennium, triennium, quadrennium, quinquennium, sexennium, septennium, octennium, novennium, decennium, centennium, quincentennium, vicennium, tricennium, millennium, centimillennium, millionennium

   • 1882, Nelson Loverin, Loverin’s Chart of Time, Centograph and Slate‎^[1], page 37:

     A Millennium consists of one thousand years. / A Decamillennium is ten thousand years. / […]  / A Centimillennium embraces a period of one hundred thousand years.

   • 1888, Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: Anthropogenesis, pages 623–624:

     There is most assuredly an occult “chronological system in Hebrew Scripture”—the Kabala being its warrant; there is in it “a system of weeks”—which is based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be found in the old Jyotisha.* And there are in it cycles of “the week of days,” of the “week of months,” of years, of centuries, and even of millenniums, decamillenniums, and more, or “the week of years of years.”†

   • 1946, Gustave O. Arlt, transl., Star of the Unborn, Viking Press, translation of original by Werfel, Franz, page 225:

     That this bare room, in spite of its barrenness, was a Catholic church, was attested by the high altar which had preserved its form unchanged through the decamillennia and was crowned by a tall, gold, gleaming monstrance.

   • 1965, Wallace C. Halsey, Cosmic End-Time Secrets, Futura Press, page 78:

     These suns are selected by the Creator Sun and are commissioned by Gabriel as the most high of the constellations for service during one decamillennium, which is 10,000 of our standard years. / In their time it is 10,000 years precisely. But because we are placed farther out of the infinite light, and our vibrations are much slower here, there is a time-drag factor of about 5. […] And each of the most high rulers, in accordance with the present policy, has a period of service on the headquarters of a constellation for 3 decamillenniums, which in our time is 150,000 years.

   • 1972, International Geological Congress: Abstracts, volume 24, page 519:

     A fundamental question in any analysis of volcanic activity is the absence or presence of memory effects, and if present, their kind and extent. The time scales involved are also basic: some volcanic phenomena take place within hours or even shorter intervals, others need millennia or even decamillennia to produce observable effects.

   • 1990, Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, Counterpoint, published 2010, →ISBN, page 190:

     It is this present time, the twelve thousand or so years since the ice age and the twelve thousand or so years yet to come, that is our little territory. We will be judged or judge ourselves by how we have lived with each other and the world during these two decamillennia.

   • 1992, Orson Scott Card, Flux: Tales of Human Futures, Tor Books, →ISBN:

     Before he could get into the main body of the article, however, the house computer informed him that someone was at the door of the apartment. It was a message that crawled along the bottom of the lector display. Leyel pressed the key that brought the message to the front, in letters large enough to read. For the thousandth time he wished that sometime in the decamillennia of human history, somebody had invented a computer capable of speech.

   • 1993, Iain Banks, Against a Dark Background‎^[2], Orbit Books, pages 34, 82:

     “The faith responded in kind; a prophet had a vision and decided that the Messiah couldn’t be born until the faithful had their treasure back, or the female line of the family had died out; whichever came first. And however it worked, it had to happen by the time of the decamillennium.” […] “This is a terrible thing, isn’t it? Here we are, about to start the second decamillennium, and your faith wants to hunt down and kill—preferably put to death ceremonially, in fact—a woman who has never been convicted of anything and whose only crime appears to be having been born, and being born female.”

   • 1999, The Review of Archaeology, page 16:

     In each case, the artifact is an original message from times long past which should be viewed only in its palaeo-historic context—if, indeed, such a context has been established. This is particularly difficult in the case of the rare earliest Aurignacian objects. Yet, via the immediately subsequent Pavlovian/Gravettian finds, their general features, nevertheless, permit them to be placed in the context of artifacts created 20,000 years later, in the final decamillennium of the Palaeolithic era.

   • 2000, Shrikant G. Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, →ISBN, page 77:

     The Western scholars measure their periods of the various Maṇḍala in terms of decades, while some Indian scholars go to the other extreme and measure them in terms of millenniums and decamillenniums.

   • 2002, Cristie L. March, Rewriting Scotland: Welsh, McLean, Warner, Banks, Galloway, and Kennedy, Manchester University Press, →ISBN, page 90:

     Banks also writes against proselytising, comparing it to imperial invasion in Consider Phlebas. The Culture chooses to fight against the Idirians,^[sic] whose dogmatic religious beliefs lead them to conquer and forcibly convert other civilisations and races. He continues with this concept of dogmatism in Against a Dark Background in which Sharrow is legally hunted by a religious sect, the Huhsz, who need to sacrifice her in order for their Messiah to be born by the decamillennium.

   • 2003, Gyula Décsy, editor, The Chinese Protolanguage: An Attempt at a Comprehensive Internal Reconstruction, →ISBN, pages 95–96:

     However, the extremely sophisticated form of the Chinese characters—the result of a development which can comprise millennia if not decamillennia—limits its application in non-Chinese areas.

   • 2007, Pierre Hubert, Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia, Daniel Schertzer, Hocine Bendjoudi, Shaun Lovejoy, “Predetermination of Floods”, in O.F. Vasiliev, P.H.A.J.M. van Gelder, E.J. Plate, M.V. Bolgov, editors, Extreme Hydrological Events: New Concepts for Security, Springer, →ISBN, On Probability and Return Periods of Floods (section 2), page 187:

     It is perfectly legitimate to be interested, particularly for safety studies, by millennium floods or floods or decamillennium floods (i.e. having a probability 0,001 and 0,0001 respectively to occur in the course of given year) of a river which did not exist five thousand years ago and that will not exist perhaps any more in ten thousand years, similarly to the industrial interest in the probability of faults which will not undoubtedly occur, because the minimization of their probability is an aspect of a policy of industrial security.

   • 2008, Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, Free Press, →ISBN, page 182:

     We will encounter the bug in a mere eight thousand years, when the four digits of the year 9999 roll over to the five digits of the year 10,000. From the perspective of the transcendental future, it is never too early to plan ahead. / Deathswitch.com / While the Long Now Foundation worries about a decamillennium bug, others worry about personal transcendental-future issues.

   • 2009, Anthony J. Parsons, Athol D. Abrahams, editors, Geomorphology of Desert Environments, 2nd edition, Springer, →ISBN, page 508:

     Fig. 16.20 Geomorphically annotated hydrograph (heavy line) of a hypothetical palaeolake cycle in a hydrographically closed basin. Patterned in part after Lake Bonneville (e.g. Currey et al. 1984). Hydrograph depicts decamillennium-scale change (lacustral episode and phases) and millennium-scale oscillations (subphases); century-scale fluctuations are not shown except as implied by beach dots; decade-scale variation lies within the hydrograph line width

   • 2012, “The Biological Centrality of Talk (Raymond E. Jennings and Joseph J. Thompson)”, in Alexander Kravchenko, editor, Cognitive Dynamics in Linguistic Interactions, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, →ISBN, Introduction, page 33:

     A human is, biologically, a linguistic organism. Genetically, he (as we will call her) is genetic heir to many decamillennia of accumulated morphological rejiggings, including neural changes that have made possible the production and apprehension of speech.

   • 2014, Gary Snyder, Julia Martin, “Selected Letters”, in Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, Trinity University Press, →ISBN, page 211:

     Hard to say just how far I might take a study of rock art, mainly to see it as part of a poem / essay I might do on the procession of animals as witnessed by humans in the moment, or over the last four decamillennia. […] Yr friend, Gary. / November 12, 1996

Related terms

• decamillennial
• decamillionaire