annuālis

Annual comes from Latin annuālis, from annus (year). The word entered English in the fourteenth century meaning 'occurring once a year' — an annual event, an annual payment. The botanical meaning appeared in the sixteenth century: an annual plant germinates, flowers, sets seed, and dies within a single growing season. The plant's entire life is one year or less.

Annual plants include most of the world's food crops: wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, tomatoes, lettuce. Agriculture, in its most basic form, is the planting and harvesting of annuals. The word annual, applied to crops, describes the fundamental rhythm of farming: plant, tend, harvest, plant again. Every agricultural calendar is organized around the annual cycle of annual plants.

The word also names a type of publication. An annual was a book published once a year, usually around Christmas. Victorian annuals — gift books with poetry, prose, and illustrations — were enormously popular from the 1820s to the 1860s. The Keepsake, The Forget-Me-Not, and Heath's Book of Beauty were annuals. The word connected the yearly cycle of publishing to the yearly cycle of nature.

Annual reports, annual meetings, annual reviews, annual subscriptions — the word is one of the most common temporal adjectives in English. It measures time by the year, the way daily measures by the day and monthly by the month. The Latin word for a year became the English word for everything that happens once in one.