Week

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The article days of the week covers each day of the week in detail.

A week is a unit of time longer than a day and shorter than a month. In most modern calendars, including the Gregorian calendar, the week is a period of seven days, making it the longest conventionally used time unit that contains a fixed number of days. Although having no direct astronomical basis, it is widely used as a unit of time, especially in the social and commercial context.

Weeks can be thought of as forming an independent continuous calendar running in parallel with various other calendars. However, some novel calendars have been designed in which the weeks and years are forced into synchronization by adding a leap week or weekless days into the calendar. The advantage of these calendars is that a given date always falls on the same day of the week every year. For example the proposed World calendar has 52 weeks and 1 or 2 extra days each year, while the French Revolutionary Calendar had 36 weeks of 10 days and 5 or 6 extra days. Alternatively, instead of adding extra days outside of weeks, it is possible to add entire weeks to the calendar if the years are allowed to vary in length —: the former Icelandic calendar had years of 52 or 53 weeks.

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The week as indicator of market day

Although seven day weeks are common to all modern societies now, anthropologists note that weeks of other durations (varying from three to eight days) are found in many pre-modern societies. They also observe that the name for "week" is often the same for "market day", suggesting the concept of a week is likely to arise in any agrarian or pre-agrarian society where people have marketplaces or market days. <ref>http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/W/WE/WEEK.htm</ref>

In sparsely populated areas where trade is not conducted every day it is essential that farmers and consumers agree in advance on what day they will meet, especially if the walk to market takes several hours or days. The week (meaning a fixed count of days) was much simpler and more precise way of doing this when compared with a lunar calendar-based system or a system based on the seasonal rotation of the celestial sphere. The only disadvantage was the week was not "heavenly", being based on the count of mere men rather on the motion of the moon and stars. In the traditional seven-day week, this shortcoming is overcome by assigning the sun, moon, and the five planets known to the ancients (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) each to a specific day of the week.

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Origin of the seven-day week

Image:Weekday heptagram.ant.pngThe seven-day week became established in both the West and East according to different paths:

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Babylonian, Hindu, and Jewish seven-day week

  • Hindu civilization is known to have had the concept of seven-day week with instances in the Ramayana, a sacred epic written in Sanskrit about 300 BC, in which there is a mention of Bhanu-vaar meaning Sunday, Soma-vaar meaning Moon-day and so forth.
  • The ancient Babylonians are known to have observed a seven-day week; each day dedicated to a different deity. The significance of seven comes from Babylonian astronomy. There are the seven heavenly bodies or luminaries normally visible to the naked eye (the Sun, Moon, and 5 visible planets), and they associated each with a deity.
  • The biblical creation also includes a seven-day week; according to which God laboured for six days and rested on the seventh, and the Ten Commandments which contained God's instruction to observe the week. The Islamic calendar includes a seven-day week as well.
  • Other theories speculate that the fixed seven-day period is a simplification of quarter a lunar month.
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Chinese seven-day week

The Chinese use of the seven day week (and thus Korean, Japanese, Tibetan, and Vietnamese use) traces back to Babylonian calendar imported by Jesuit in the 16th century. Thus the 19th century Japanese, when encountering Europeans for the first time, were surprised to find their own names for the days of the week corresponded to the English names (and in fact were better preservations of the original Babylonian concepts, the English day names having been conflated with heros from Norse mythology). By contrast, the Japanese names refer to the Chinese Sun, Moon, and the five planets. The only difference is that the planets in the Japanese week have Chinese names based on the 'Five Elements' (not including Sun and Moon) rather than pagan gods.<ref>Days of the Week in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese</ref>

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Later use of the week

Various groups of citizens of the Roman Empire adopted the week, especially those who had spent time in the eastern parts of the empire, such as Egypt, where the 7-day week was in use. Contemporaneously, Christians, following the biblical instruction, spread the week's use along with their religion.

As the early Christians evolved from being Jewish to being a distinct group, various groups evolved from celebrating both the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and the first day or the Lord's Day (Sunday), to celebrating only Sunday. See: Sabbath (Christian); Shabbat (Jewish).

In the early 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine regulated the use of the week due to a problem of the myriad uses of various days for religious observance, and established Sunday as the day for religious observance and rest for all groups, not just those Christians and others who were already observing Sunday.

The Jews of the 4th century retained their tradition of Saturday observance, by then 800 to 1700 years old, and continue to do so. Later, after the establishment of Islam, Friday became that religion's day of observance.

The seven-day week soon became a practice among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Following European colonization and the subsequent rise of global corporate business, the seven-day week has become universal in keeping time, even in cultures that did not practise it before. Because of the two-day weekend, some modern calendars end the week on Sunday and begin it on Monday. The international standard ISO 8601 also defines Monday as the first day of the week. In practice, this means that calendar formats disagree, and that "next week" said on Sunday means "the week beginning tomorrow".

In that international standard, the "first week of the year" is that week which includes the first Thursday of the year. This way the first week of the year does not start with a long weekend (Friday to Sunday), as the New Year's Day itself is a holiday in many countries.

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Facts and figures

  • 1 week = 7 days
  • 1 week = 168 hours = 10,080 minutes = 604,800 seconds (except at daylight saving time transitions or leap seconds)
  • 1 Gregorian calendar year = 52 weeks + 1 day (2 days in a leap year)
  • 1 week = 23.00% of an average month

In a Gregorian mean year there are exactly 365.2425 days, and thus exactly 52.1775 weeks (unlike the Julian year of 365.25 days, which does not contain a number of weeks represented by a finite decimal expansion). There are exactly 20871 weeks in 400 Gregorian years, so 25 December 1605 was a Sunday just like 25 December 2005.

A system of Dominical letters has been used to determine the day of week in the Gregorian or the Julian calendar.

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Week number

ISO 8601 includes a numbering system for weeks; each week is associated with the year in which Thursday occurs. Thus, for example, week 1 of 2004 (2004W01) ran from Monday 29 December 2003 to Sunday, 4 January 2004. The highest week number in a year may be 52 or 53. This style of numbering is commonly used (for example, by businesses) in some European countries, but rare elsewhere.

The numbering system in different countries may deviate from the international ISO standard. There are at least six possibilities<ref>http://www.pjh2.de/datetime/weeknumber/wnd.php?l=en#Legend</ref> <ref>Calendar Weeks</ref>:

First day of week First week of year contains Weeks assigned twice Used by/in
Monday 1 January, 1st Sunday, 1–7 days of year yes
Wednesday 1 January, 1st Tuesday, 1–7 days of year yes
Saturday 1 January, 1st Friday, 1–7 days of year yes
Sunday 1 January, 1st Saturday, 1–7 days of year yes USA
Monday 4 January, 1st Thursday, 4–7 days of year no ISO 8601
Monday 7 January, 1st Monday, 7 days of year no
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See also

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External links

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Bibliography

<references/>als:Woche ar:أسبوع bs:Sedmica ca:Setmana cv:Эрне cs:Týden da:Uge de:Woche es:Semana eo:Semajno eu:Aste fo:Vika fr:Semaine fy:Wike fur:Setemane gl:Semana ko:주 (시간) hr:Tjedan ia:Septimana it:Settimana he:שבוע kw:Seythun ht:Semènn lv:Nedēļa lt:Savaitė nl:Week ja:週 no:Ukedager nn:Veke nds:Week pl:Tydzień pt:Semana ru:Неделя simple:Week sr:Седмица sh:Sedmica fi:Viikko sv:Vecka tl:Linggo (panahon) ta:வாரம் zh:星期

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