Thursday

Thursday is the fourth day of the ISO week, the eve of Friday and, in a lot of offices, the unofficial start of the weekend. It belongs to Thor.

The Old English name Þunresdæg meant "Thunor's day", after the thunder god better known by his Norse name. German Donnerstag and Dutch donderdag still say "thunder day" outright. The Romans picked Jupiter, king of their gods and another hurler of lightning, so the day became jeudi in French, giovedì in Italian and jueves in Spanish. Two cultures, two thunder gods, one Thursday. Portuguese numbers it as quinta-feira, and Latvian as ceturtdiena, "fourth day".

It is also the day calendar makers rely on. Under ISO 8601 the first week of a year is the one that contains its first Thursday, which is why 1 January sometimes falls in week 52 or 53 of the previous year. American Thanksgiving is held on the fourth Thursday of November, fixed by Congress in 1941 after Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday a week earlier in 1939 to give shops a longer Christmas season; critics mocked it as Franksgiving. Every British general election since 1935 has been held on a Thursday, a custom with no law behind it.

The religious calendar has Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, when the British monarch hands out specially minted Maundy money to older people, one recipient for each year of the sovereign's age. The internet added its own ritual in the early 2010s: Throwback Thursday, or #TBT, when social media fills up with old school photos, bad haircuts and holiday pictures from a decade earlier. For a day stuck between the middle of the week and its end, Thursday has collected a surprising number of jobs.