Time until Friday

The target here is the midnight that opens the next Friday, not the end of the working afternoon, so the figure on screen is the time until the day begins rather than the time until you clock off. Add your own finishing hour to it before treating it as the moment anything is over. Friday is also the day whose meaning changes most from one country to the next: the last working day in some places, the weekend in others, and a day of congregational prayer in much of the Muslim world.

Most countdowns to Friday are really countdowns to a cut-off. Weekly reporting, timesheets, payroll files and invoice runs collect on the Thursday and the Friday, and anything handed to somebody else late in the day will be looked at on the Monday. Payment is where that bites hardest, and which rail you are on decides it rather than the hour you press send. Cinema releases open on a Friday in Britain and the United States, and the American monthly employment report is published on a Friday morning, which is why markets and newsrooms plan around the day. Software teams tend to freeze releases from Friday lunchtime, on the reasoning that a fault found at five o'clock is a fault nobody is on hand to fix.

In much of the Middle East and North Africa the weekend is Friday and Saturday, so a Friday email to Riyadh or Cairo lands on a day off and the favour comes back on a Sunday. Iran takes Friday alone as its weekly holiday. Israel works Sunday to Thursday, with Friday a short day that ends before the sabbath begins at sunset, and public transport in most of the country stops with it. The United Arab Emirates moved in 2022 to a Saturday and Sunday weekend with a half day on the Friday, which put it out of step with its neighbours to line up with financial markets abroad. Where a four-day week has been adopted, the Friday is usually the day given back.

The next one falls on the next Friday, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The English name means the day of Frig, a goddess associated in Old English with love and marriage. It is a translation rather than an invention: the Romans called the day dies Veneris after Venus, and the Germanic peoples who took the seven-day week from them matched each Roman god to the nearest of their own. The Romance languages kept Venus outright, which is why French has vendredi, Spanish viernes and Italian venerdi.

Plenty of languages skip the gods. Portuguese counts the week out instead, making Friday sexta-feira, the sixth. Arabic calls it al-jumu'ah, the day of gathering, after the midday prayer that fills mosques and shortens the working day in Muslim-majority countries. Greek uses Paraskevi, meaning preparation, because it is the day before the sabbath. The superstition about the thirteenth is narrower than it looks: Greece and much of the Spanish-speaking world put their unlucky thirteenth on a Tuesday, and Italy worries about Friday the seventeenth instead.