The Oxford English Dictionary lists “weekend” in the sense of “the conclusion of a week’s time” going back to 1300 or 1400 (but notes that this sense is “obsolete”), and in the sense “The end of the week” as far back as 1638.
But, in the sense of
it’s definitely later.
They do give a quotation for this sense all the way back to 1793, but I’m not really sure how they determined “weekend” was being used in this meaning and not one of the older senses:
Perhaps there was more in the original context to indicate the word was being used in the modern sense.
An 1844 quote also seems maybe a little ambiguous to me:
It seems to me that could have meant “I am not one of those who think that Almighty God ever designed that human beings should be employed from morn to night—from [the end of the week] to [the end of the week]”–which to me could still be read as not really quite meaning “the period between two working weeks [that is, Saturday and Sunday] typically regarded as a time for leisure or recreation”.
Otherwise, it seems to be late 19th century:
Note, though, that even the 1879 quote is still not referring to what we would consider the full “weekend”–“the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon”; nowadays we would more likely say the “weekend” begins at 5:00 P.M. (or whenever) on Friday, and ends at either bedtime Sunday evening, or when you have to get up on Monday morning. As in
Major timezone & dateline differences matter too, even among countries / societies using the same weekday / weekend convention.
For some years I lived in the US central timezone and one of our key customers was in New Zealand, 17 hours and 1 day in the future compared to us. Except during those months of the year when one of us had switched to DST and the other had not. And of course they did DST during our (Northern) winter and from their POV, we did DST during their winter. It was a real head-scratcher for the less scientifically inclined folks on our team.
We had about 3 hours per day on just 4 days of the week when we could reasonably hold a conference call without inconveniencing one end or the other.
All absolute statements are false, including this one.
The Sun is the biggest and the fastest moving of the “planetos”, so the first day of the week is named after it, at least in many languages and cultures. But this is a big planet (well, not relatively speaking), and there are a lot of cultures and languages, and they don’t all put the same emphasis on astronomy.
Portuguese does that too, more or less. Saturday and Sunday have special names, but Monday to Friday are numbered as market days, like farmers market. Monday is segunda-feira, meaning second market, Tuesday is terça-feira meaning third market, up to Friday, sexta-feira, meaning sixth market.
So much of Portuguese is close to Spanish that it sure must be a puzzler to Spanish speakers to hear these totally unrecognizable day names coming up in conversation.
Are you sure about that? (Unless I’ve been whooshed.) Your comment did remind of something I found quite amusing while I was in the UAE: there’s a supermarket called Safestway.
I just checked the Workweek and weekend. Brunei has a rough system, IMHO: The workdays are Monday through Thursday and Saturday.
Checking out the the wiki for Computus, I see that celebrating Easter only on Sunday was not universally accepted at one time.
And that calendar started on Sept. 22 1792, which appears to have been a Saturday. So if they started the first ten day week on a Saturday … Each week is ten days, so that doesn’t really matter though I guess. Their week started on firstday.
Egypt was great at copycatting! There was a restaurant near my apartment in Cairo called “Pizza Hat” (complete with the Pizza Hut logo, which, once you have seen it as a hat, is impossible to regard in any other way). I never did know if:
They meant to 100% copy the words “Pizza Hut” but made a non-native language speaker unintentional mistake (especially likely with vowel mixups, I suspect, since Arabic doesn’t write them out).
They meant to copy “Pizza Hut” but mis-read “hut” as “hat” because of the logo, so wrote “hat” on purpose but thought “hat” was correct.
They were trying to avoid having the real Pizza Hut sue them.
While you could argue that Monday is the natural “first day of the week” because that’s when the workweek starts, by the same token, you’d then have to say that Friday is the last day of the week. And if the week starts on Friday, then Saturday isn’t the weekend any more, because it’s a day away from the end of the week.
It makes much more sense to call Sunday the first day of the week, so the work week is concentric with the full week, and you have two weekend days, one on the front end and the other on the back end.
Like so many English words, “end” has multiple opposing meanings. End can mean “edge” or it can mean “rear”.
“Those are bookends” = I’d expect to find one each symmetrically at the left and right edges of a row of books.
“That’s the end of the train” = there goes the caboose, not here comes the engine.
Assuming the workweek is Mon-Fri by whatever names then which version of “end” is meant in “weekend” determines whether Sat & Sun should be the first and last days of the week or should be the last two days of the week.
I favor the second definition so in my world Mon is the first day of the week and Sat & Sun adjacent are the last 2. Granted that’s not standard US usage today. Then again neither is 1700 for happy hour, SI units for common measures, and ISO-8601 for dates. But I can hope. Be the change you want to see.
From all reports, the ten-day week was extremely unpopular in the French Republic. I don’t know what days off they got under it, but I think the typical workman got less time off. At any rate, they went back to a 7-day week in 1802.
In most countries, that minor change in the name would not protect them from a trademark lawsuit. And they’d most likely lose it, at least in the US. So the reason must be one of the others.
Oh, I know that changing “hut” to “hat” wouldn’t work. But I am not so sure a random enterprising Egyptian businessman trying to start a small-scale restaurant would know that.
