Thursdays

How to spell thursdays

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thursdays

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thursdays mean?

1. nounThe plural of Thursday, the fifth day of the week, or a reference to that day as a recurring time.
2. adverbOn every Thursday; each Thursday as a regular occurrence.

Thursdays in a sentence

• noun

  The gym is busiest on thursdays, when the evening classes fill up.

• adverb

  She works from home thursdays and catches up on emails in the quiet.

• noun

  All of my thursdays this month are blocked out for staff training.

• adverb

  The recycling truck comes thursdays, so we leave the bins out the night before.

Where does thursdays come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English Thunresdaeg, which literally meant 'Thunor's day', Thunor being the Anglo-Saxon thunder god equivalent to the Norse Thor. The naming was a direct Germanic answer to the Roman dies Iovis, the 'day of Jupiter', since Jupiter and Thunor were both sky and thunder deities; this practice of matching Roman gods to local ones gave several English weekday names their shape. Over the centuries the spelling smoothed from Thunresdaeg to Thoresday and finally to the modern 'Thursday', losing the inner 'n' sound that the silent thunder god once carried. The plural and adverbial form simply adds the regular '-s', so 'thursdays' refers to several of these days or to something that happens on that day each week. A handy memory hook is that the first syllable still hides 'Thor', which is why it is spelled 'thurs' and not 'thirs'.

How the word is built

• thursdaes... thurs (from Thunor/Thor, the thunder god)
• day (a day)
• -s (plural/adverbial marker)