Holidays and calendar glossary
The terms in our holiday, bridge-day and calendar pages, defined one by one, with the legal source when the term comes from law or convention.
7 terms · The definitions are ours; where a term has an official definition, the source is named.
- National holiday and regional holiday
- Discretionary day off
- Movable holiday
- Easter computus
- Bridge day
- Working day
- ISO 8601 week
- National holiday and regional holiday
- A national holiday applies across the whole country, set by federal law; a regional one (state, provincial or municipal) applies only inside that jurisdiction, under its own law. The same date can be a day off in one city and an ordinary working day a hundred kilometres away — which is why this page always states each date's scope.
- Discretionary day off
- A day on which public offices may close, but closing is not required by law — each agency, business or school decides for itself. It does not count as a holiday for labour-law purposes, which is why this page lists it separately from the table.
- Movable holiday
- A holiday that does not fall on a fixed civil-calendar date because it is counted from Easter (Carnival, Good Friday, Corpus Christi) or follows an "nth weekday of the month" rule (such as US Thanksgiving). The date shifts every year within a known range.
- Easter computus
- The algorithm that fixes Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox, a rule set at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE). Because it depends on the Moon, the date ranges between 22 March and 25 April, and every movable Christian holiday is counted from it.
- Standard definition by Meeus/Butcher algorithm (Gregorian calendar)
- Bridge day
- One or two working days between a holiday and the weekend (or between two holidays) that, taken as leave, join up into a longer break without spending many vacation days. This page's bridge-day table shows where that happens each year.
- Working day
- A day that is not a Saturday, a Sunday or an effective holiday (discretionary days and bank holidays do not count here). It is the unit used for legal deadlines, contracts and payroll, so the year's total of working days changes with that place's holiday calendar.
- Standard definition by Convenção OIT 52/1936 (descanso semanal e feriados)
- ISO 8601 week
- The week numbering of the international ISO 8601 standard: the week starts on Monday, and week 1 of the year is the one containing January's first Thursday. Under that rule, the last days of December can belong to week 1 of the next year, and the first days of January can belong to the previous year's last week.
- Standard definition by ISO 8601