Is Saturday the loneliest day of the week?
These are the frequencies of days of the week in a corpus of 2 million words
of transcribed speech and a corpus of 2 million words of written journalism
and general non-fiction.
|
Spoken |
Speech Order |
Written |
Writing Order |
| Sunday |
435 |
1 |
275 |
2 |
| Monday |
319 |
4 |
184 |
4 |
| Tuesday |
160 |
7 |
148 |
6 |
| Wednesday |
243 |
5 |
156 |
5 |
| Thursday |
180 |
6 |
122 |
7 |
| Friday |
380 |
2 |
196 |
3 |
| Saturday |
346 |
3 |
285 |
1 |
| Totals |
2063 |
|
1366 |
|
It seems that we talk about days of the week more than we write about them,
and that we are more interested in the weekend than in weekdays, with
Saturday, Sunday and Friday filling the top three places both in speech and
in writing. It is interesting that Friday overtakes Saturday in speech but
is a long way behind in writing. Monday takes fourth place, Wednesday fifth,
while Tuesday and Thursday are the least mentioned. While there are only
trivial differences in the frequencies of the weekdays in written English,
when it comes to speech Monday is almost twice as often mentioned as
Tuesday.
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John Higgins, Stirling, March 1998, updated Chiang Mai, June 2024