Black Friday

Black Friday means the Friday after the American Thanksgiving, the day on which retailers begin their big sales together. Ask where the name came from and the answer is in the street, not in the ledger. Q: Why is it a "black" Friday? A: Because the Philadelphia police called the day Black Friday for the shopping crowds and the traffic that made it a hard day of work. The words first. The previous page showed that Friday is Old English frīgedæg, the day of Frigg, the goddess who took the place of Venus in the Roman week. Black is Old English blæc, which Etymonline traces through Proto-Germanic *blakaz, "burnt," to the Proto-Indo-European root *bhleg-, "to burn, gleam, shine, flash." Etymonline ties that root in turn to *bhel- (1), "to shine, flash, burn," and derives bleach, "to make white," from the same *bhel-, so black and white parted from one older stem. The connecting notions, the same dictionary adds, are perhaps "fire" (bright) and "burned" (dark), and it quotes the Oxford English Dictionary that in Middle English it is often doubtful whether blak means "black" or "pale." Then the history. The day most often named as the first recorded Black Friday in English is Friday 24 September 1869. Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the New York gold market, the corner failed, the price of gold collapsed, and the day was called Black Friday. London had its own Black Friday on 11 May 1866, and Friday the 13th has also been called Black Friday, but the one of 1869 is the best known. English has long put black on days of disaster. Thursday 24 October and Tuesday 29 October 1929 opened the Great Depression and are remembered as Black Thursday and Black Tuesday; the crash of Monday 19 October 1987 is Black Monday. All of them are names for collapse. Now Philadelphia. The day after Thanksgiving got the name from the mouths of police officers. A newsletter of 18 December 1961, Public Relations News, preserves the sentence: "it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday" (found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake and reported by Ben Zimmer). It was an unwelcome name given by the police, who, as the newsletter puts it, found the resulting traffic jams an irksome problem. Philadelphia merchants disliked the sound of it and, on the advice of the deputy city representative Abe S. Rosen, tried Big Friday instead, and Big Friday did not take. A Philadelphia print item of January 1966, found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake and cited by Ben Zimmer, introduces the day as the name the Philadelphia Police Department had given to the Friday after Thanksgiving. Earlier still, in November 1951, a column in the trade journal Factory Management and Maintenance used Black Friday for the mass sick leave of the Friday after Thanksgiving, which it called "Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis": the shop is half empty "when the 'Black Friday' comes along" (found by Bonnie Taylor-Blake). That is absenteeism, not shopping, and Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of the shopping sense to 1961. Whether it was absence from the factory or congestion in the street, the first Black Friday meant a hard day for somebody. The name stayed in Philadelphia for a while and then spread. On 29 November 1975 the New York Times, in a report on the Army-Navy game, told a national readership that Philadelphia police and bus drivers call the day Black Friday, and the term spread to other cities through the 1970s and 1980s. Even in 1985 it was not yet in common use nationwide, and by the 1990s, as history.com and the Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn put it, it had gone national. The meaning turned over in between. On 28 November 1981 the Philadelphia Inquirer asked why the day was called Black Friday and quoted Grace McFeeley of Cherry Hill Mall: because it is a day retailers make profits, black ink. That is the first place the red-to-black explanation has been found in print. History.com calls this explanation inaccurate, and Merriam-Webster, which dates the first known use of this sense to 1961, adds that its origin "is not known for certain." By order of attestation the police term comes first and the ledger story is an explanation attached afterward, but that explanation is what changed the sound of the name. Once the black of disaster was read as the black of a ledger, Black Friday alone, among names shaped like Black Thursday and Black Monday, became the name of a festival. The story crossed the sea. In Korea a government-led Korea Black Friday ran from 1 to 14 October 2015 and was renamed Korea Sale Festa from 2016. Urimalsaem, the open Korean dictionary, glosses 블랙 프라이데이 as the day after the American Thanksgiving, "the last Thursday of November," and lists a separate entry for the Korean edition (the American statute says the fourth Thursday, so the gloss slips in years with five); the Standard Korean Dictionary has no entry yet. In Korean the loanword is written with a space, 블랙 프라이데이, under the transcription rules, and often typed without one, 블랙프라이데이, in a search box. The dates for 2026: the American Thanksgiving falls on Thursday 26 November, Black Friday on Friday 27 November, and the following Monday, 30 November, is Cyber Monday. Today the phrase reaches past the United States to the sales that shops and online stores in Britain, Europe, and Korea hold in the same week, and what was a day has in many places become a week or a month. Friday is the day of Frigg, and the black in front of it was once the color of a hard shift as the police saw it. Now it is the color of the line outside the store. The month into which this sale runs on, December, is the next word.