” Contemporaries” is not exactly what I am looking for - but is there are word for two or more people born on the same day? They are not related, and they could be born in different centuries.
It seems like there should be a word, but I cant seem to find it.
I can’t find a lot of information about a word for this. However, I did find the phrase ‘birth cohort’ and it means roughly people born in the same time period and can be more than a day. It can be a year or a group of years. Not as pretty as contemporary though. Perhaps someone else has some other ideas.
Thank you for taking the time. I still have not found anything better than your solution (or mine above) and I remain surprised that the English language doent have ONE word for this occurrence.
People born on the same day & month, though not the same year (therefore not necessarily contemporaries) and not of the same mother. Twins implies they are born the same day (except for the very rare exception)
Let me explain what I’m looking for and how this search started: my mother is born November 9, 1916.
Her friend is a great-great-grandmother to a little girl that was born last November 9.
So they are both born on the same calendar day and month, but not the same year; they are not related.
I am looking for one word that would best describe this relationship.
Thanks again everyone for taking up this challenge - if such it is.
VM
Thank you, word-lover-from-Down-Under, otherwise known as Doug. I think this might do it for now - unless somewhere along the line someone will come up with other options.
Much appreciated,
Vianna
(in Florida, living one mile from this beach)
Last try - an anniversary is a celebration of something happening on a particular date. A contemporary is someone alive at the same time as someone else; an adversary is someone opposing someone else. From the French “né”, the past participle of “naitre”, meaning born,, a néversary would be someone born on the same date, and two or more people born on the same birthdate would be néversaries.
You could argue for masculine and feminine forms of né, so perhaps “both born” would be conaitre - I know! I know ! Annéeversary would also describe it, but would be too confusing.
If none of these qualify, a rather charming phrase for it would be “someone of the same candle”.
My own claim to fame is that I was once the youngest person in the whole world !
To ring down the curtain on this topic, people who died on the same day would be dead equal.
A neversary would be an excellent choice if one didn’t have to explain how the word was arrived at. To most Americans one would have to explain. So I think I’ll settle for (birth)date mates.
And yes, it’s “landside”. I took the picture. We have such glorious sunsets most evenings on the West coast of Florida.
(the dead equal is priceless - thank you for the smile!)
So finally we arrive at a word that the Scots would appreciate, the Americans would (might) understand, that both a great-great-grandmother and a little girl would be delighted with - “candlekin”.
“Candlekin” is a wonderful word because it immediately evokes the image of friends or brethren sitting together at a table lit by a single candle, sharing a meal or some discussion topic—in an otherwise dark and chilly room where the only warmth comes from that candle and the humans gathered around it. This whole image flashes fast and clear on the first hearing of the word (though invented here ad hoc by douglang to try to satisfy Vianna’s special purpose, yet I am a little surprised that Doug didn’t first try the anagrammatic ‘CALENDAR-KIN’, my having already been exposed to his not-always-relevant wordplay fascination). We need recall that “relevance” and “usefulness” are real-world criteria for the acceptability of new words, which we who sit here inventing (“fun-venting”?) neologisms may often forget. With that in mind, I importuned a group of native-Russian friends and asked if there was a Russian-language solution fitting Vianna’s original search, knowing that in Russian there is a far far richer store of special-purpose words, really quite unattainable and unimaginable in English [example: odnigorshoshchniki means “kids who use the same chamberpot”; i.e., people who shared a childhood room together]. Their consensus: Russian has no such word, at the same time embarrassing me with the properly pointed question: “WHO WOULD NEED SUCH A WORD?” Not the grandmother born in 1916, nor the little girl born on the same November date in 2007, neither of whom has shown up here to plead for such a word; only Vianna so pleads. MORAL: If there’s no such word in either English or Russian, it probably means that world-wide there is a negligible demand. But in Russian, knowing standard prefixes, roots, suffixes, etc., you can invent new words with impunity (far more than we dare to in English, which is why “candlekin” is such a fun exception). So with such permissiveness in mind, I made bold to inventively translate “candlekin” as “odnisvechniki”, and there was a good appreciative laugh all around; douglang would have been glad. But you try inventing words on the fly in English, what do you get?? You get glared at, that’s what you get (except within the marvelously lax playpen confines of a thread-group like this . . .). —- Russophile
Nice to hear from a fellow larrikin (if that’s not a tautology) - fascinating ! Could you do me the favour of asking your Russian mates how to translate Bandito’s experience of “potty-training” (in the context of preparation for the graces of polite society at a formal shindig) into how to approach a debutante for a polka!
Calendarkin didn’t spring to mind, because I arrived at the word by the concept of “someone of the same candle”, which I had to get out of bed and write down in the wee small hours in case I forgot it. “Candlekin” coalesced the next morning, on an A320 midway between Dubai and Bahrain. Must be something to do with airline food.
