week
/wiːk
/- This was not the case if you looked at polls as recently as a month or six weeks ago.
- The truth is our patience should have been exhausted weeks and months and years ago.
- I must apologize to a reader who wrote me concerning last month's column a week or two ago.
- Bizarre moment of the week came last night, as I was driving along Western Road in Hove.
- I have been working seven days a week for the past four years and it has been pretty tiring.
- We are completely sleep-deprived, running on 3 hours of sleep a night for the past week.
- Mr Hamer said he expected to stay open to midnight on week nights and a bit later on weekends.
- It will not be useful to my work, as I am an office clerk, but I spent three hours each week at it.
- The second half of the week was spent discussing issues that affect us all.
- The remainder of their week is spent split evenly between the classroom and the workplace.
Phrases
a week on ——
week in, week out
Origin
Old English wice, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch week and German Woche, from a base probably meaning 'sequence, series'.
An Old English word that is probably from a root meaning ‘sequence, series’. The seven-day week used in the Hebrew and then the Christian calendar corresponds to the biblical creation story, in which God created the universe in six days then rested on the seventh. The Romans, who adopted it in ad 321, would have brought this week over to Britain. ‘A week is a long time in politics’ was first said by Harold Wilson, the British Labour prime minister, at the time of the 1964 sterling crisis. Wilson came up with a number of memorable phrases, including ‘the gnomes of Zurich’, to describe Swiss financiers (1956), ‘the university of the air’ (1963) as a name for the Open University, which his government founded, and ‘the pound here in Britain, in your pocket, or purse, or bank’ (1967), which is often quoted as ‘the pound in your pocket’. See also tuesday