Other forms: weekends; weekending; weekended
For most of us, the weekend is Saturday and Sunday — the days you don't have to go to school or work. If you've got big weekend plans, time may seem to move extra slowly on Friday.
We often take weekends for granted, looking forward to a nice, two-day rest from our weekday responsibilities, but the concept of a weekend is a relatively recent one. After the Industrial Revolution, workers often found themselves laboring six or even seven days a week. You can thank 20th-century labor unions for the modern weekend we know today — it was their activism that eventually standardized the five-day workweek.