News Summary

• The term Black Friday first appeared in print in 1610 when schoolchildren used the phrase to refer to any Friday on which exams took place.
• English speakers have attached the adjective "black" to the name of a day of the week to "denote a specific past date associated with disaster, defeat, ruin" since the 1570s.
• In the 1950s, Philadelphia police and/or retail employees coined the term to describe what was, for them, a reliably frustrating workday.
• In 2010, a third explanation for the name gained traction on social media, in which it was claimed that Black Friday reflected the discounted auctions of Black slaves that, before the abolition of slavery in the U.S., were allegedly held on that day.