7 ms·

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usua

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places? I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.

sethhochberg 4y ago
“Weekend” in the US typically refers to Saturday / Sunday. Monday through Friday is the workweek.
masklinn 4y ago
The american weekend is sat-sun. Work week starts on the second day of the week. Because reasons.
octobus2021 4y ago
That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...
- tolmasky 4y ago
  The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".
- mcv 4y ago
  There are many reasons to call Sunday the first say of the week. Mostly historical ones. Weeks have existed for far longer than the US or in fact any modern country has. Or the concept of a 5-day work week, in fact. The Monday as the first day of the week is modern revisionism.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  The five day workweek is a fairly new thing (early to mid 20th century); the day numbering thing is much older.
- bsdetector 4y ago
  Think of it as "weekends" as in the limits of the week not "weekend" as in the last part of the week. In SMWTTFS the Saturday and Sunday are at the ends as in limits of the week, and furthermore it makes sense for there to be two "weekend" days like there are two bookends. In MWTTFSS Sunday is the only actual end of the week with Saturday being included just because(?) and Monday being "weekbegin", which isn't really a word in English. So based on this SMWTTFS seems more logical and sensible at least in English.
  - octobus2021 4y ago
    Why would I think of a weekend not as a weekend but as weekendS, which is 2 days, one of which is the end and another is beginning? It's called weekend, as in the end which follows the week. Which therefore starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. I mean I get it that Sunday being the first day of the week is a leftover from religious past but this does not make it any more logical when applied to the workweek/weekend cadence. Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?
    - anjbe 4y ago
      > Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it? What benefit would we get from doing so? Metric I can understand the benefits of, though I also see why Americans are resistant implementing such a disruptive change in daily life. But shifting our definition of the week by one day provides no benefit that I can see, nor does keeping it the way it is cause any harm. The primary argument I’ve seen in these threads is “because the word ‘weekend’ doesn’t make sense,” but that’s not very convincing to me since I and every other American I know find the phrasing perfectly natural—and if we want to make the English vocabulary perfectly ‘logical’ and ‘consistent,’ there are far more disturbing malapropisms in common use to tackle first.
- Terretta 4y ago
  No reason other than some 6000-7000 years of record keeping by Hebrews, tracking the 7th day.
  - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
    The Hebrew calendar kept changing as they moved and adapted the calendar designed by the ruler of the lands. Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian and sabbath itself can be traced back to the Babylonian loan word for fifteen..mistaken as seven. šabattu is the 15th day of the month, the time of the full moon Vs “sebūtu“ was the 7th day of the lunar quarter. The Akkadians had no concept of ‘week’. They simply followed the moon. Starting with the new moon, first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. Their festivals were based on the 1, 7 etc and 15 day with the 15th day being observed as the bright full moon. It must have been from the Babylonians that the Hebrews adopted the 7 day week because they had seen them celebrate the 7th day, “sebūtu“. Altho they probably chose the word for the 15th day/full moon of Babylonian šabattu as it’s closer to Hebrew ‘sabbot’ and their word for ‘rest’. Post exile Hebrews took this to create the Hebrew calender and created sabbot as the 7th day of rest. The Babylonians celebrated 1, 7, 21 and 28th day after new moon as the beginning of each quarter. Hebrews simply took each quarter to be a slice of time instead of differentiating between the four quarters between two new moons.
    - anjbe 4y ago
      I’ve seen this theory proposed, but is it actually widely accepted by historians? Wikipedia says that a connection “has been suggested”[0], which doesn’t seem like very strong wording. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat
      - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
        Yes..it was proposed by a linguist, iirc. There is only one 2015 paper where I have read it. But it seems most plausible. Consider this. The Greeks had no calender. Cannanite Hebrews had no Egyptian admixture. So what remains is the sandwich period from where the record keeping must have been directly influenced by the Babylonians.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generally is used colloquially to mean whichever two simultaneous days the speaker or audience is off work, insofar as they have two consecutive days off work. I believe, but I may be wrong, that the inconsistency arises from Sunday being the Christian sabbath. That “starts” the week, but it’s a traditional day off for religious observance. And this tradition goes back well before the 40 hour work week, and the common Monday–Friday work week. Which is to say that “weekend” didn’t originally have connotations about which days were work days, they were typically all work days except for the Christian sabbath. Which as a retcon makes the present colloquial usage even odder, even if it’s (maybe?) more consistent with how other countries/cultures use it.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.
  - pantojax45 4y ago
    There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      Almost universally meant to mean in the next 6 days. Next week implies after 7 days.
      - 4y ago
yepguy 4y ago
Obviously Sunday is the left end of the week, Saturday the right.
- Lio 4y ago
  If that's the case then surely it should be called the "weekends" plural rather than just "weekend" singular. :P
beaned 4y ago
The way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.
School-Cotton 4y ago
Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday). Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.
irrational 4y ago
The concept of weekend is quite a recent development. https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.
- ivlad 4y ago
  Why is this important? Maybe it was, but the ISO standard now is that Sunday is the last day of the week.
  - irrational 4y ago
    I was responding to the post above mine and not to the topmost post.
jtsiskin 4y ago
Think of it like bookend: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bookend https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bookend

sethhochberg 4y ago

“Weekend” in the US typically refers to Saturday / Sunday. Monday through Friday is the workweek.

masklinn 4y ago

The american weekend is sat-sun. Work week starts on the second day of the week. Because reasons.

octobus2021 4y ago

That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...

tolmasky 4y ago
The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
School-Cotton 4y ago
There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
pteraspidomorph 4y ago
It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".
mcv 4y ago
There are many reasons to call Sunday the first say of the week. Mostly historical ones. Weeks have existed for far longer than the US or in fact any modern country has. Or the concept of a 5-day work week, in fact. The Monday as the first day of the week is modern revisionism.
rsynnott 4y ago
The five day workweek is a fairly new thing (early to mid 20th century); the day numbering thing is much older.
bsdetector 4y ago
Think of it as "weekends" as in the limits of the week not "weekend" as in the last part of the week. In SMWTTFS the Saturday and Sunday are at the ends as in limits of the week, and furthermore it makes sense for there to be two "weekend" days like there are two bookends. In MWTTFSS Sunday is the only actual end of the week with Saturday being included just because(?) and Monday being "weekbegin", which isn't really a word in English. So based on this SMWTTFS seems more logical and sensible at least in English.
- octobus2021 4y ago
  Why would I think of a weekend not as a weekend but as weekendS, which is 2 days, one of which is the end and another is beginning? It's called weekend, as in the end which follows the week. Which therefore starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. I mean I get it that Sunday being the first day of the week is a leftover from religious past but this does not make it any more logical when applied to the workweek/weekend cadence. Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?
  - anjbe 4y ago
    > Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it? What benefit would we get from doing so? Metric I can understand the benefits of, though I also see why Americans are resistant implementing such a disruptive change in daily life. But shifting our definition of the week by one day provides no benefit that I can see, nor does keeping it the way it is cause any harm. The primary argument I’ve seen in these threads is “because the word ‘weekend’ doesn’t make sense,” but that’s not very convincing to me since I and every other American I know find the phrasing perfectly natural—and if we want to make the English vocabulary perfectly ‘logical’ and ‘consistent,’ there are far more disturbing malapropisms in common use to tackle first.
Terretta 4y ago
No reason other than some 6000-7000 years of record keeping by Hebrews, tracking the 7th day.
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
  The Hebrew calendar kept changing as they moved and adapted the calendar designed by the ruler of the lands. Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian and sabbath itself can be traced back to the Babylonian loan word for fifteen..mistaken as seven. šabattu is the 15th day of the month, the time of the full moon Vs “sebūtu“ was the 7th day of the lunar quarter. The Akkadians had no concept of ‘week’. They simply followed the moon. Starting with the new moon, first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. Their festivals were based on the 1, 7 etc and 15 day with the 15th day being observed as the bright full moon. It must have been from the Babylonians that the Hebrews adopted the 7 day week because they had seen them celebrate the 7th day, “sebūtu“. Altho they probably chose the word for the 15th day/full moon of Babylonian šabattu as it’s closer to Hebrew ‘sabbot’ and their word for ‘rest’. Post exile Hebrews took this to create the Hebrew calender and created sabbot as the 7th day of rest. The Babylonians celebrated 1, 7, 21 and 28th day after new moon as the beginning of each quarter. Hebrews simply took each quarter to be a slice of time instead of differentiating between the four quarters between two new moons.
  - anjbe 4y ago
    I’ve seen this theory proposed, but is it actually widely accepted by historians? Wikipedia says that a connection “has been suggested”[0], which doesn’t seem like very strong wording. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat
    - jelliclesfarm 4y ago
      Yes..it was proposed by a linguist, iirc. There is only one 2015 paper where I have read it. But it seems most plausible. Consider this. The Greeks had no calender. Cannanite Hebrews had no Egyptian admixture. So what remains is the sandwich period from where the record keeping must have been directly influenced by the Babylonians.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generally is used colloquially to mean whichever two simultaneous days the speaker or audience is off work, insofar as they have two consecutive days off work. I believe, but I may be wrong, that the inconsistency arises from Sunday being the Christian sabbath. That “starts” the week, but it’s a traditional day off for religious observance. And this tradition goes back well before the 40 hour work week, and the common Monday–Friday work week. Which is to say that “weekend” didn’t originally have connotations about which days were work days, they were typically all work days except for the Christian sabbath. Which as a retcon makes the present colloquial usage even odder, even if it’s (maybe?) more consistent with how other countries/cultures use it.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.
- pantojax45 4y ago
  There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Almost universally meant to mean in the next 6 days. Next week implies after 7 days.
    - 4y ago

yepguy 4y ago

Obviously Sunday is the left end of the week, Saturday the right.

Lio 4y ago
If that's the case then surely it should be called the "weekends" plural rather than just "weekend" singular. :P

beaned 4y ago

The way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.

School-Cotton 4y ago

Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday). Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.

irrational 4y ago

The concept of weekend is quite a recent development. https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.

ivlad 4y ago
Why is this important? Maybe it was, but the ISO standard now is that Sunday is the last day of the week.
- irrational 4y ago
  I was responding to the post above mine and not to the topmost post.

jtsiskin 4y ago

Think of it like bookend: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bookend https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bookend