Word.ws English Dictionary

half-holiday

half-holiday noun: half of a working or school day set aside for recreation on a special occasion.

Noun

half-holiday (plural half-holidays)

  1. Half of a working or school day set aside for recreation on a special occasion.
    • 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.1784, obituary of Daniel Wray in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Volume 54, Part 1, p. 72
    • 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.1844, Charles Dickens, chapter 11, in Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Chapman & Hall, page 142
  2. (historical) A religious festival lasting for half a day.
    • 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.1636, Peter Heylyn, The History of the Sabbath, London: Henry Seile, Book 1, Chapter 4, p. 83
    • But this [Carmentalia] was an half holiday, (intercisus); for after mid day it was dies profestus, a common work day.1792, Alexander Adam, Roman Antiquities, Edinburgh: W. Creech, pages 333–334

Examples of half-holiday in a sentence

  • Bradly was late getting into town—he had forgotten that Saturday was a half-holiday.1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 98:
  • 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.1971, Graham Greene, chapter 2, in A Sort of Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, page 71:

Forms of half-holiday

pluralhalf-holidays

Questions about half-holiday

What does half-holiday mean?
Half-holiday means half of a working or school day set aside for recreation on a special occasion.
How do you use half-holiday in a sentence?
Bradly was late getting into town—he had forgotten that Saturday was a half-holiday.
What part of speech is half-holiday?
Half-holiday is a noun.
What is the plural of half-holiday?
The plural of half-holiday is half-holidays.

Words near half-holiday in the dictionary

  1. half-hearted
  2. half-heartedly
  3. half-heartedness
  4. half-hitch
  5. half-hitches
  6. half-holiday
  7. half-holidays
  8. half-hour
  9. half-hourlong
  10. half-hourly
  11. half-hours

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: half-holiday (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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