Week

How to spell week

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce week

What does week mean?

1. nounA period of seven consecutive days, often counted from Monday or Sunday.

Week in a sentence

• The report is due at the end of next week.

• She takes the train into the city three days a week.

Where does week come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English wice or wicu, meaning a period of seven days, and it traces back to a common Germanic root shared with Dutch week and German Woche. Scholars connect the underlying ancient root to a sense of 'turning' or 'sequence', the idea being a recurring cycle that comes round again and again, which fits the way a week endlessly repeats. The seven-day structure itself came into Germanic culture partly through Roman and Jewish reckoning, but the native English name stayed. Over time the spelling settled with a double 'e' that sounds the same as its homophone 'weak', and that is the precise trap: 'week' the time unit keeps the 'ee', while 'weak' meaning feeble takes 'ea'. Keeping the calendar word linked to its plain Germanic roots helps fix that 'ee' in memory.

How the word is built

• week (a single word from Old English wicu, 'period of seven days'); no separable affixes

Words that sound like week

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• weak: Lacking physical strength, force, intensity, or firmness.