Definition
A period of seven consecutive days. In legal contexts, "week" carries two distinct operational meanings depending on use:
1. Calendar week: The fixed period beginning with Sunday and ending at midnight on Saturday. This meaning governs when a statute, contract, or instrument requires something to occur "once a week" or within a specific calendar week, and the timing aligns to the Sunday–Saturday structure.
2. Any seven-day period: A rolling period of seven consecutive days, measured from whatever point is contextually relevant — such as from the date of an event, the date of filing, or the date of first publication. This meaning governs most deadline and notice calculations where no fixed day of commencement is specified.
Which meaning applies depends on context, the governing instrument, and applicable rules of construction. Courts have accepted both readings; the distinction matters most in notice requirements and recurring publication rules.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Any period of seven consecutive days; or a period beginning with Sunday or Monday; or colloquially, the five-day working period from Monday through Friday.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A period of seven days, usually reckoned from one Sabbath or Sunday to the next.
Editorial note: The common meaning of "week" is intuitive but deceptively imprecise. The legal gap appears when a statute or contract requires action "once a week" or "for three consecutive weeks" — courts must then determine whether the Sunday–Saturday calendar controls or whether any seven-day span suffices. That choice can determine whether a notice was legally adequate or a deadline was met.
Common Confusion
"Week" is sometimes conflated with "business week" or "working week" (Monday through Friday), which is the colloquial sense used in everyday employment contexts. Statutes and contracts that use "week" without qualification generally do not mean five days. Courts applying notice or publication requirements have consistently held that "week" means seven days, not a five-day workweek. Researchers should be alert to this gap, particularly in older employment cases and labor statutes where "week's wages" or "weekly pay" may invoke a different computation than the calendar-week rule.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap with "week" is the rolling-versus-calendar ambiguity. A researcher examining a notice dispute — particularly in mortgage foreclosure, probate publication, or statutory notice schemes — must determine which interpretation the jurisdiction applies. Historical cases frequently turned on whether overlapping Sunday–Saturday periods counted as distinct weeks or whether the seven-day period ran from the date of first publication regardless of the day it fell on.
Anderson's Dictionary illustrates the stakes directly: the rule that "once a week" means once between each Sunday and Saturday night governed whether a publication made on consecutive Saturdays and Mondays satisfied a "two weeks' notice" requirement. The answer changes depending on which definition of "week" the court adopts.
For deadline research, note that many modern procedural rules (federal and state) have moved to explicit "days" calculations, which displaces the older "weeks" language. When reading pre-twentieth-century statutes and instruments, "week" almost always means the rolling seven-day period unless context fixes a calendar anchor. Modern codes are more likely to anchor to calendar structure.
Jurisdictional variation in publication notice statutes is significant: some states have codified the Sunday–Saturday calendar week for newspaper publication purposes; others treat "week" as any seven consecutive days. This affects whether a second publication on the following Monday completes a "two-week" notice or falls short.
Cross-corpus connections: "week" appears as a unit of measure in statute of limitations discussions, redemption period calculations, notice requirements, wage-and-hour law, and lease and tenancy provisions. In each context, the applicable definition may differ.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are in substantial agreement on the core definition — seven days — but divide on the calendar-anchoring question. Bouvier's and Black's (1st Ed.) both give the primary definition as simply "seven days of time," with Bouvier adding that the week commences immediately after midnight between Saturday and Sunday. Black's (2nd Ed.) acknowledges both the fixed-period and rolling readings explicitly, citing cases in which each was applied. Anderson's is the most operationally detailed, specifying that "once a week" means once per Sunday-to-Saturday cycle and addressing publication notice directly.
Notably, none of the historical sources resolve the ambiguity between the two definitions with a clear hierarchy of preference. They record coexistence of both meanings, leaving resolution to context and judicial construction. This is a gap that historical dictionaries leave open, and it remains live in modern practice wherever "week" appears in instruments without further specification.
Bouvier's treatment of publication notice under mortgage power-of-sale clauses (truncated in the available text) is among the most practically useful passages for researchers dealing with foreclosure notice disputes in nineteenth-century records.
Jurisdictional Note
Some jurisdictions have by statute fixed "week" to the Sunday–Saturday calendar for purposes of publication requirements, while others apply the rolling seven-day rule. Federal courts applying state notice statutes will look to state court interpretation of the term. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume uniformity even when the statutory text appears identical.