workday
Americannoun
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workdays
plural
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a day on which work is done; working day.
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the part of a day during which one works.
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the length of time during a day on which one works.
a seven-hour workday.
adjective
noun
adjective
Usage
What does workday mean? A workday is any day that you work. Most commonly, workday refers to one of the days in the workweek, the span of (often five) days that are not the weekend and when many people work. The standard workweek is from Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday being considered the weekend, though working schedules vary widely. Many full-time jobs involve a 40-hour workweek consisting of five eight-hour workdays. In this sense, workweek refers to all the time spent working in a week, and a workday refers to the hours spent working in a day. Workday sometimes refers just to the part of the day that you work, as in After the workday, I like to unwind by taking a walk around the lake before I go home for the night. The word workday is sometimes used to distinguish it from other nonwork days during a certain period, as in My vacation is 11 days away—and only eight workdays!The workweek can also be called the working week, and a workday can also be called a working day. Workday is sometimes used as an adjective meaning commonplace, ordinary, or everyday, as in It has average, workday features—nothing special. The variant workaday is more commonly used to mean the same thing. Example: My workday consists of catching up on emails for the first hour or so, and then I’m in meetings for several hours, leaving me an hour or two to get some actual work done.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of workday
1400–50; late Middle English werkday, Old English weorcdæg. See work, day
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Burbank has a population of about 100,000, which doubles during the workday.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 7, 2026
The blackouts disrupt schedules, spoil products and make each workday unpredictable.
From Barron's ● Aug. 4, 2026
Participants who spent a large portion of their workday sitting actually had larger frontal and occipital lobes and lower white matter hyperintensity volumes.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 21, 2026
Between 2022 and 2024, a staggering 84% of remote workers spent their entire workday operating completely alone, compared to just 23.2% of on-site workers, the paper noted.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 27, 2026
Blacks and whites hoard the streetcar at the end of a workday in the Union Stock Yard.
From "A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919" by Claire Hartfield
Maintaining a faster pace to tackle more tasks results in longer workdays.
From Slate ● Apr. 9, 2026
Participants were randomly assigned to take either solriamfetol or a placebo on workdays over a four-week period.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 1, 2026
Wigler noted that the promise of hitting goals fast with AI tempts tech start-up teams already prone to long workdays to lose track of time and stay on the job even deeper into the night.
From Barron's ● Mar. 30, 2026
The move follows CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss’s request for her charges to explain how they spend their workdays, and the Department of Government Efficiency’s demand for government employees to list their accomplishments.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 29, 2026
For people who spent their workdays watching the ups and downs of reactor pressure and heat, and making constant adjustments to keep things running safely, it was a worst-case scenario.
From "Meltdown" by Deirdre Langeland
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
