means a legal restriction on the number of terms or total time a person may serve in a particular elected office.

from A compound of plain English parts: "term," from Latin "terminus" (a boundary or end point, the same root that gave us "terminal" and "terminate"), joined to "limit," from Latin "limes" (a border or boundary path, originally the marked edge between fields). So a "term limit" is doubly about edges — a boundary set on a boundaried stretch of time. The idea is ancient even if the phrase is modern: classical Athens and the Roman Republic rotated offices to keep power from pooling, and the modern American usage crystallized around debates over how long an officeholder should be allowed to stay put.