Definition of "twelvemonth"
twelvemonth
noun
plural twelvemonths
Quotations
Take the annals of the majority of hearths for a twelvemonth, and we should be amazed at the quantity of wretchedness that would be writ in them, if writ truly.
1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XX, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), page 166
For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; […]
1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, page 196
She was ill very nigh a twelvemonth altogether; and I had to nurse her as best as I could, and clean the house, and cook, and make her gruel and everything, for we could not afford to pay a woman to help us.
1861 December, “Autobiography of a Navvy”, in David Masson, editor, Macmillan’s Magazine, volume V, number 26, Cambridge, Cambs., London: Macmillan and Co. […], published 1862, chapter VII (Our Last Tramp), page 151, column 2
Then they were moved away from the field that had stood fallow for a twelvemonth and there a third and last ploughing preluded the planting of the wheat and other seed for the coming year.
1937, H[enry] S[tanley] Bennett, “The Peasant’s Year”, in Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150-1400 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought), Cambridge, Cambs.: At the University Press, published 1938, page 84