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Is there a word used to describe the extremities of an arbitrary time period? The word "weekend" refers to the end of a week, but it's limited to the week and it only describes the end, but not the beginning. I'm looking for a word that means both "weekend" and "the start of the week", but isn't limited to weeks.

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closed as not a real question by aedia λ, kiamlaluno, MετάEd, tchrist, Kristina Lopez Apr 11 '13 at 13:08


I think there's some misunderstanding here. Weekend doesn't mean "the end of a week". It means the two days (Saturday and Sunday) that aren't classified as weekdays (the standard "working week"). The weekend is always those two days, regardless of whether you consider Saturday or Sunday to be the last day of the week. In my (British) experience, most businesses treat Sunday as the first day of the week, if that's a working day in their line of work. –  FumbleFingers Apr 11 '13 at 4:37

2 Answers 2

  • Beginning and end, are the most general terminology.

  • Prologue and Epilogue are literary-inspired words that have a similar meaning of bracketing the period (or story).

  • If it's related to an event, you might have setup and takedown times.

  • One convention for calendars is the contractions AX and BX, where BX is time before before event X and AX is time after the event. However, such events are usually short or marked at some overly-precise time.

    For example, the Gregorian Calendar has BC and AD, meaning Before Christ and Anno Domini, the Year of our Lord.

    The calendar is marked in terms of the Brith of Jesus. Star Wars's Expanded Universe marks years in terms of the Battle of Yavin, as BY (Before Yavin) or AY (After Yavin).

  • Sports teams will often have a warm up and cool down around working out, practicing, or playing.

  • Space missions use a clock centered on the planned liftoff time, so time before that is T-x and time after that is T+x.

Do any of those fit your situation?

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I'm working on code to go into a calendar program and I'm trying to refer to the first and last day of each time unit. Weekend kinda works for weeks, but only in locales where Friday through Sunday are considered to be the end and start of the week, respectively. Also, I'm looking for a single word, not a pair of words. –  Moshe Apr 11 '13 at 3:01


  • Await next backoff period boundary
  • Perform CCA on next backoff period boundary
    Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks Holger Karl, Andreas Willig (p.144)


  • the horizon rolls from period boundary to period boundary.

  • Move the current period to the next period boundary of interest, …
    Aimms Language Reference Johannes Bisschop, Marcel Roelofs (p.443)

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