weekdays
weekdays
Old English
“Weekday meant not holy long before it meant not a holiday from work.”
The Old English compound 'wucodæg' appears in 9th-century texts, naming any ordinary day as distinct from a holy day. The first element, 'wucu,' traces to Proto-Germanic wikō, a word for a succession or series, the same root giving Dutch 'week' and German 'Woche.' The seven-day week this compound divided was a recent arrival in the Germanic world, carried from Rome. Rome had adopted it from Babylonian astronomy, which organized the calendar around the seven planetary bodies visible to the naked eye.
Roman writers in the 1st century AD record the seven-day planetary week gaining popularity alongside the older Roman eight-day market week. Constantine formalized the seven-day week in Roman law in 321 AD, designating 'dies Solis' (the Sun's day) as a day of rest. When Germanic speakers encountered this Latin system, they kept the structure but swapped the gods: 'dies Martis' became Tiwesdæg (Tiw's day), 'dies Mercurii' became Wōdnesdæg (Woden's day), 'dies Iovis' became Þūnresdæg (Thor's day). Saturday alone kept a Latin-derived form, from 'Saturni dies.'
In Middle English, 'weke dai' stabilized as any non-holy day, with 'holy-day' as its counterpart. The modern split between weekday and weekend is much younger: 'weekend' is first recorded in 1879 in an English sporting magazine, referring to Saturday afternoon through Monday. The two-day Saturday-Sunday weekend as a labor standard did not arrive until the 20th century, formalized in the United States by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
The plural 'weekdays,' meaning Monday through Friday, crystallized in the 20th century as the five-day workweek became law across industrialized countries. Old English speakers would have found the distinction odd, working on what we now call Saturday and resting on Sunday and feast days when the liturgical calendar demanded. The seven-day cycle those speakers inherited from Babylon had been running, without interruption, for over two thousand years. The week divided life differently before clocks and factories divided it for us.
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Today
Today 'weekdays' is a scheduling word above all. In most English-speaking countries it names Monday through Friday, the working week enshrined in labor law and school calendars. In some countries, including several with Islamic-majority populations, the working week runs Sunday through Thursday, making 'weekday' a culturally variable category. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and equivalent legislation elsewhere fixed the five-day pattern into law, but the word predates all of these arrangements by over a thousand years.
The days once had gods in their names; now they have meetings. But Woden and Thor still show up, reliably, every Wednesday and Thursday.
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