Weekend
In contemporary American culture, the weekend generally signi-fies the end of the traditional work week, or the period from Friday night to Monday morning, a popular time for organized or unorganized leisure activities and for religious observances. Historically, the weekend was synonymous with the Sabbath which, among European cultures, was marked on Sunday by Christians and on Saturday by Jews. To understand the weekend, some background on the origin of the week itself is helpful. Human time was first measured by nature's cycles, seasonal for longer units, and celestial for shorter ones (i.e., the rising and setting of the sun, and the phases of the moon). Today this influence persists in that the names of the days are derived from the ancient astrological seven-day planetary week: "Monday," a corruption of the word "Moonday," which in turn evolved from European derivations of the Latin word for moon, and "Sunday," the day long considered the first of the week until gradually being perceived as the last day of the weekend. The first calendar was devised by the Egyptians, who bequeathed it to ensuing civilizations. Egypt divided the years into three seasons, based on the cycles of the river Nile, and twelve months.
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