half-holiday

plural half-holidays

1. Half of a working or school day set aside for recreation on a special occasion.

   Bradly was late getting into town—he had forgotten that Saturday was a half-holiday. But he was in time to lay in stores at Cooley’s, and call at the butcher’s and greengrocer’s while the parcels were being made up.

   1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 98

   3 more examples

   1784, obituary of Daniel Wray in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Volume 54, Part 1, p. 72, 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.

   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

   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. A V.C. ranked as a whole holiday, but this only happened twice).

   1971, Graham Greene, chapter 2, in A Sort of Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, page 71

2. historicalA religious festival lasting for half a day.

   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

   1 more example

   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