girl Friday

American  

noun

Older Use: Sometimes Offensive.

plural

girl Fridays

1. gal Friday.

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girl Friday British  

noun

1. a female employee who has a wide range of duties, usually including secretarial and clerical work

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girl Friday Idioms  

1. Also, gal Friday. An efficient and faithful female assistant, as in I'll have my girl Friday get the papers together. The expression plays on man Friday, a name for a devoted male servant or assistant. The name Friday comes from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, whose shipwrecked hero named the young native who became his faithful companion for the day of the week when he found him. In the mid-1900s Friday was applied to a male servant and then a women secretary or clerk who works for a man. The expression girl Friday gained currency through a motion picture starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday (1940). Today it tends to be considered condescending and, applied to a woman, sexist.

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Etymology

Origin of girl Friday

First recorded in 1935–40; modeled on man Friday

Example Sentences

Firefighters rescued a teenage girl Friday from the Wendy Trail in Newbury Park after she suffered a reported rattlesnake bite.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 22, 2026

It took a considerable hunch on the part of Davis, then in her early 70s, to hire the 20-something college graduate from San Bernardino as her girl Friday.

From New York Times • Dec. 1, 2017

She started working for Bowie in London in 1973 when she answered an advert in the London Evening Standard asking for a "girl Friday for a busy office".

From BBC • Jan. 9, 2017

It had all been described to me in great detail by June Shelley, who, in those crucial months in the early seventies, served the Stones as a girl Friday.

From Salon • May 15, 2016

“And, who, Mr. Woolford, was your girl Friday last year?”

From Status Quo by Reynolds, Mack