Friday

Friday means the fifth day of the week counted from Monday. The word comes from Old English frīgedæg, "day of Frigg," and its path runs through the place where the Roman sky met the Germanic pantheon. Q: Why is the day called Friday? A: Because the Germanic peoples took the Roman "day of Venus" and renamed it for their own goddess Frigg. Rome first. The Romans gave one day each to seven planets, Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, and built the week from them. Cassius Dio, in Roman History 37.18, writes that "the custom of referring the days to the seven stars called planets was instituted by the Egyptians, but is now found among all mankind" (Loeb translation). The day of Venus was dies Veneris, rendering Greek Ἀφροδίτης ἡμέρα, "day of Aphrodite." Then the Germanic tribes. Beyond the Rhine the week was adopted and its gods were swapped for native ones: Mars became Tiw (Tuesday), Mercury became Woden (Wednesday), Jupiter became Thor (Thursday), and in the place of Venus stood Frigg. Scholars call the practice interpretatio germanica. From it came Old English frīgedæg, Old High German frîatac, and Old Norse frjádagr, the ancestors of Friday and German Freitag. Etymonline calls the day name "a West Germanic translation of Latin dies Veneris," which in turn rendered Greek Aphrodites hēmera. Who was Frigg? The wife of Odin, and in Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning the mother who makes every creature and thing swear not to harm her son Baldr, overlooks the mistletoe, and loses him to it. An earlier witness is Paul the Deacon's History of the Lombards, book 1, chapter 8, where Frea tricks her husband Godan into granting the Winnili, the later Lombards, victory: seeing the long beards at sunrise, Godan asks "who are these longbeards?" and Frea answers that he who gave the name must give the victory too. It is the origin tale of the Lombard name. Whether Frigg and Freyja were originally one goddess is a question on which scholars differ. The name is the point. Frigg comes from Proto-Germanic *frijjō, "beloved one, wife," from the root *frij-, "to love," and from that same root English free (first "of the beloved, the household, not a slave," then "at liberty") and friend (a participle, "one who loves") are said to descend; Etymonline gives the root as Proto-Indo-European *pri-, "to love," and friend as its present participle, while the path of free is the received account. Friday is a cousin of free and friend. Most Romance languages kept Venus: French vendredi, Italian venerdì, Spanish viernes are all children of Veneris. English, German, Dutch (vrijdag), and Swedish (fredag), all Germanic languages, changed the goddess. Now East Asia. Korean 금요일 is 金曜日, "day of the metal star," and the metal star is Venus. The 七曜 system, which assigns days to the seven luminaries, is said to have reached Tang China through Buddhist astrological texts such as the Sukuyō-kyō translated by Amoghavajra in the eighth century, where the planet is written 金曜太白 with its Sogdian, Persian, and Sanskrit names beside it; Japan adopted it in 1876, when a Council of State order of 12 March gave government offices Sundays off and half-day Saturdays from April. Korea took it a year before the solar calendar of 1 January 1896, the first year of Geonyang (see the calendar page): a cabinet ordinance of 1895 gave government offices Sundays off. Chinese 星期五 simply counts, "week-five," and Venus does not appear. English received Venus as a goddess of love and wrote Frigg; Korean received the same Venus as a star in the sky and wrote 金. One planet, written down twice in two ways. The modern uses. Man Friday, "a loyal helper," comes from the name Crusoe gives the man he rescues on a Friday in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe of 1719. Black Friday has two layers. Friday 24 September 1869, when the gold corner of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk collapsed the New York gold price, earned the name first; the day-after-Thanksgiving sense comes from Philadelphia police naming the crowds and traffic of the shopping day; a 1961 record already says it had "become customary for police to refer to post-Thanksgiving shopping as Black Friday and Black Saturday." The explanation that retailers' ledgers turn from red to black that day is a folk etymology attached later. The American Thanksgiving of 2026 falls on Thursday 26 November, and Friday 27 November is Black Friday. The English word for 금요일 is Friday, abbreviated Fri. and pronounced /ˈfraɪdeɪ/. TGIF, "Thank God It's Friday," is the sigh before the weekend, and the aversion to Friday the thirteenth is a modern habit whose date is hard to fix. Friday is the day of the goddess of love and the day of the metal star, and the day on which the week closes its door.