Interesting facts about Friday

Friday is the day of the week between Thursday and Saturday.

According to the ISO 8601 international standard, it is the fifth day of the week. However, in the US, Canada, and Japan, it’s counted as the sixth day of the week. In Iran, Friday is the last day of the weekend, with Saturday as the first day of the working week.

In many languages, the names given to the seven days of the week are derived from the names of the classical planets in Hellenistic astronomy, which were in turn named after contemporary deities, a system introduced by the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity.

The eanglish names of the day of the week were coined in the Roman era, in Greek and Latin.

The name “Friday” comes from the Old English frīġedæġ, meaning the “day of Frig”, a result of an old convention associating the Germanic goddess Frigg with the Roman goddess Venus, with whom the day is associated in many different cultures.

The expected cognate name in Old Norse would be friggjar-dagr. The name of Friday in Old Norse is frjá-dagr instead, indicating a loan of the week-day names from Low German – however, the modern Faroese name is fríggjadagur. The modern Scandinavian form is fredag in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, meaning Freyja’s day. The distinction between Freyja and Frigg in some Germanic mythologies is contested.

The word for Friday in most Romance languages is derived from Latin dies Veneris or “day of Venus”, such as vendredi in French, venres in Galician, divendres in Catalan, vennari in Corsican, venerdì in Italian, vineri in Romanian, and viernes in Spanish and influencing the Filipino biyernes or byernes, and the Chamorro betnes. This is also reflected in the p-Celtic Welsh language as Gwener.

An exception is Portuguese, also a Romance language, which uses the word sexta-feira, meaning “sixth day of liturgical celebration”, derived from the Latin feria sexta used in religious texts where it was not allowed to consecrate days to pagan gods.

Most Slavic languages call Friday the “fifth (day)”: Belarusian pyatnitsa, Bulgarian petŭk, Croatian petak, Czech pátek, Polish piątek, Russian pyatnitsa, Serbian petak, Slovak piatok, Slovene petek, and
Ukrainian p’yatnitsya. The Hungarian word péntek is a loan from Pannonian dialect of Slavic language. The n in péntek suggests an early adoption from Slavic, when many Slavic dialects still had nasal
vowels.

In Japanese, 金曜日- kinyōbi – is formed from the words 金星kinsei – meaning Venus (lit. gold + planet) and 曜日yōbi meaning day (of the week).

In both biblical and modern Hebrew, Friday is יום שישי Yom Shishi meaning “the sixth day.”

In Christianity, Good Friday is the Friday before Easter that commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox Church, every Friday is a fasting day, when people abstain from meat, poultry, and dairy products, although fish is permitted.

Traditionally, Roman Catholics were obliged to refrain from eating the meat of warm-blooded animals on Fridays, although fish was allowed. The Filet-O-Fish was invented in 1962 by Lou Groen, a McDonald’s franchise owner in Cincinnati, Ohio, in response to falling hamburger sales on Fridays resulting from the Roman Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays.

Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday and lasts until nightfall on Saturday. There is a Jewish custom to fast on the Friday of the week of Chukat.

In Hinduism, special observances are practiced for goddesses, mainly Durga/Parvati/Gowri on Friday. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday and lasts until nightfall on Saturday.

Black Friday is a colloquial term for the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States. It traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States. Many stores offer highly promoted sales at discounted prices and often open early, sometimes as early as midnight or even on Thanksgiving.

The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits.

In some cultures, superstition considers Friday an unlucky day to begin a voyage. However, Friday is regarded as a lucky day for sowing the seed.

Friday the 13th is considered to be very unlucky because of its association with the unlucky number thirteen. It usually occurs one to three times a year, and some refer to this date as Black Friday, not to be confused with the commercial Black Friday in November.

Casual Friday (also known as dress-down Friday or casual day) is a Western dress code trend in which businesses relax their dress code on Fridays. Businesses that usually require employees to wear suits, dress shirts, neckties, and dress shoes, allow more casual wear on such days.

POETS day is a term used by workers in the United Kingdom and Australia to refer jocularly to Friday as the last day of the work week. The word “POETS” is an acronym for “Piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday”: hence Friday becomes “Poets day”. It is tradition to begin the POETS day at 3:30 p.m. Variations on this are “Punch out early, tomorrow’s Saturday” (referring to a manual punch time clock), “Push off early, tomorrow’s Saturday” and “Push off early, tomorrow’s Sunday” (based on the old 6-day work week).

In astrology, Friday is connected with the planet Venus and is symbolized by that planet’s symbol ♀. Friday is also associated with the astrological signs Libra and Taurus.