half-holiday

English

Noun

half-holiday (plural half-holidays)

1. Half of a working or school day set aside for recreation on a special occasion.
   • 1784, obituary of Daniel Wray in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Volume 54, Part 1, p. 72,^[1]

     His memory is still reflected on with a degree of pleasure by some […] who can revive the long-buried ideas of what passed at that school about the year 1716 or 17; when Sir Daniel was always ready, if any body was wanted, to beg a half-holiday on Tuesday afternoons.

   • 1844, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Martin Chuzzlewit‎^[2], London: Chapman & Hall, page 142:

     Mr. Pecksniff and Mr. Jinkins came home to dinner, arm-in-arm; for the latter gentleman had made half-holiday, on purpose; thus gaining an immense advantage over the youngest gentleman and the rest, whose time, as it perversely chanced, was all bespoke, until the evening.

   • 1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 98:

     Bradly was late getting into town—he had forgotten that Saturday was a half-holiday. But he was in time to lay in stores at Cooley’s, and call at the butcher’s and greengrocer’s while the parcels were being made up.

   • 1971, Graham Greene, chapter 2, in A Sort of Life‎^[3], New York: Simon and Schuster, page 71:

     A rumor would start that an extra half-holiday was going to be given (which happened fairly frequently during the war, whenever an old boy had been decorated with a D.S.O. or an M.C. A V.C. ranked as a whole holiday, but this only happened twice).

2. (historical) A religious festival lasting for half a day.
   • 1636, Peter Heylyn, The History of the Sabbath‎^[4], London: Henry Seile, Book 1, Chapter 4, p. 83:

     For they had […] some appointed times, appropriated to the worship of their severall gods, as before was shewed: their holydayes, & half-holydayes, according to that estimation which their gods had gotten in the World.

   • 1792, Alexander Adam, Roman Antiquities‎^[5], Edinburgh: W. Creech, pages 333–334:

     But this [Carmentalia] was an half holiday, (intercisus); for after mid day it was dies profestus, a common work day.

See also

• semiholiday