Weekday vs Day-of-Week
The terms weekday and day of the week are often confused in natural languages, including English, Japanese, and Russian.
This article clarifies the distinction and documents typical sources of confusion, including those observed in machine translation.
Warning: This article is generated by ChatGPT
Two different sets
There are two commonly used, but conceptually different, sets of days:
Set A
(Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday)
This set denotes the working days of a standard calendar week.
Correct names:
Set B
(Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
This set denotes all named days forming a calendar week.
Correct names:
- English: day of the week
- Japanese: 曜日
- Russian: день недели / дни недели
Source of confusion
The confusion arises because:
1. In English, the word weekday linguistically resembles “day of the week”, although its meaning excludes Saturday and Sunday. 2. In some languages, the distinction is lexicalized (平日 vs 曜日), while in others it is implicit. 3. Machine translators may map both concepts to the same word, depending on context or lack thereof.
As a result, the term weekday is sometimes incorrectly used to denote all seven days of a week.
Machine translation
Empirical observations show that machine translators, including GoogleTranslate, may:
Such behavior contributes to semantic ambiguity and may be interpreted as a bug in the translation software.
Recommended usage
For clarity, especially in technical or educational texts:
- Use weekday only for Monday–Friday.
- Use day of the week for Monday–Sunday.
- Avoid using weekday as a synonym for “day of the week”.
Relation to other articles
References