Heyday

How to spell heyday

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heyday

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heyday mean?

1. nounThe period of greatest success, popularity, vigour, or influence.

Heyday in a sentence

• In its heyday, the factory employed half the town.

• The singer reflected on her heyday in the 1980s.

Where does heyday come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heyday began life in the 1500s as the interjection 'heyda' or 'hey-day', an exclamation of high spirits, excitement, or surprise, closely related to the simple shout 'hey'. The element written as 'day' had nothing to do with the calendar at first; it was an emphatic ending of Germanic flavour, much like the 'da' in similar exclamations across northern European languages. Over time the spoken cry of elation hardened into a noun meaning a burst of vigorous good spirits, and from there it shifted again to mean the period of greatest strength, success, or popularity in someone's life or career. The respelling of the ending as 'day' was a piece of folk etymology: speakers heard the familiar word 'day' inside it and the spelling settled there, which is exactly why writers expect a hyphen or a gap that the modern single word no longer has. Today it is written solid as one word, and the trap is forgetting that the first part is the exclamation 'hey' rather than 'hay'.

How the word is built

• hey (exclamation of high spirits and excitement)
• day (later folk-altered ending, originally an adverb suffix, not the word 'day')