ever wondered..?

While it's pouring outside, let me tell you about the frequency of names of days in English. According to the British National Corpus (100 million words of English), the most frequently mentioned days are (occurrences per million words):

1. Sunday 93
2. Saturday 83
3. Friday 55
4. Monday 53
5. Wednesday 44
6. Thursday 37
7. Tuesday 36

So, it seems that there is an understandable appreciation of the weekend days, an expected attention to the first and last working days, and a special place for the middle of the week. And if saying the words tells us anything about the view of the world, then we can say that people are apparently more dedicated to their leisure time than their work time :) People mention Sundays and Saturdays frequently when planning their outings and short breaks, and they probably mention Fridays and Mondays often in excitement, for the former, and in agony, for the latter, as they are discussing their potential plans, again, for the next weekend. Then there is an apparent peak at Wednesday since it's the middle of the week and a hopeful vantage point to look forward to the weekend coming soon. Thursday falls behind a bit because it's when people are probably too tired to be enthusiastic about anything, while Tuesday is the worst day of the week since it's all about unfinished work from Monday when people are too busy to think about the weekend at all.

Of course, if it wasn't a Saturday today, I wouldn't be blogging about this in the first place. Don't you just love weekends? :)

Mai