Friday

Friday is the fifth day of the ISO week and the last working day for most people on a Monday-to-Friday schedule. Its name honors the goddess Frigg.

Old English Frīgedæg was the day of Frigg, wife of Odin in Norse myth, often confused with the love goddess Freyja. The Romans had the same idea and gave the day to Venus: dies Veneris turned into French vendredi, Italian venerdì and Spanish viernes. In Arabic it is al-jumuʿa, "the day of gathering", when Muslims attend congregational prayers at noon, and several countries in the Middle East take Friday and Saturday as their weekend. Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe gave the name to a whole character: the castaway calls his companion Friday after the day they met.

The day has a nervous streak. Friday the 13th is the unlucky date across much of the English-speaking world, and the fear even has a Greek-built name, paraskevidekatriaphobia. A popular theory links it to Friday, 13 October 1307, when King Philip IV of France had the Knights Templar arrested, though historians find little sign of the superstition before the 19th century. Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving, got its name from Philadelphia police in the 1950s and 1960s, who used it for the traffic chaos of shoppers and football crowds; retailers later recast it as the day their books went into the black.

Most of Friday's fame is happier. The first T.G.I. Friday's restaurant opened in New York in 1965, and the 1978 disco film Thank God It's Friday won an Oscar for Donna Summer's song "Last Dance". Offices across the United States adopted casual Friday in the 1990s, borrowing an idea from Hawaii's Aloha Friday, and ties have been in retreat ever since.