Black Friday, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌblak ˈfrʌɪdeɪ/, U.S. /ˌblæk ˈfraɪˌdeɪ/
Forms: see black adj. and n. and Friday n. and adv. Also with lower-case initial.
Etymology: < black adj. + Friday n. See also black adj. 11b.
†1. School slang. A Friday on which an examination is held. Cf. Black Monday n. 2. Obs.
1610 J. Boys Expos. Dominical Epist. & Gospels 267 Let me tell them of another schoole tricke; at the worlds end there is a black friday, a generall examination.
2. (A name given to) Friday 6 December, 1745, the date on which the landing of the Young Pretender was announced in London.
1747 Information for Archibald Stuart of Edinb. 39 The Black Friday is not yet out of Remembrance.
1839 London Q. Rev. Jan. 89/1 This day of universal consternation—the day on which the rebels' approach to Derby was made known—was long remembered under the name of Black Friday.
1951 PMLA 66 972 The fugitive Young Pretender, whose bold attempt to seize ‘the Reins of Empire’ for his father had precipitated the terrors of Black Friday only seven months before.
1995 Herald(Glasgow) (Nexis) 9 Dec. 46 In the freezing dawn of ‘Black Friday’, December 6, the Highlanders began their retreat.
3. Stock Market and Finance.
a. (A name given to) Friday 11 May, 1866, the date on which a commercial panic ensued on the failure of the London banking house Overend, Gurney, & Co.
1866 Times 12 May 12/3 The failure of Messrs. Overend, Gurney, and Co. had become widely known... The day will probably be long remembered in the city of London as the ‘Black Friday’.
1922 H. W. Lanier Cent. Banking in N.Y. viii. 234 We escaped the remarkable English ‘Black Friday’ of 1866, when the panic that broke..caused a suspension of the Bank Act.
1995 Independent 28 Nov. (Suppl.) 22/6 Peto's career had its inevitable ups and downs. On ‘Black Friday’, 11 May 1866, his bank went under and he had to withdraw from public life.
b. U.S. (A name given to) Friday 24 September, 1869, a day of financial panic on Wall Street, precipitated by the introduction into the financial market of a large quantity of government gold, with the aim of making it more difficult to corner the gold market.
1869 Milwaukee(Wisconsin)Daily Sentinel 9 Oct., The following table shows the fluctuations in the New York Gold Market, on the memorable ‘Black Friday’, Sept. 24th, 1869.
1870 W. W. Fowler Ten Years in Wall St. xxxiii. 522 The sun rose up lightly and brightly on the morning of that black-Friday, September 24, 1869, as though the day were to be a jocund one.
1948 Time 14 June 89/1 There was.Jay Gould,..whose attempt to corner gold brought on the ‘Black Friday’ of 1869 and disrupted the nation's whole credit structure.
2009 B. W. Grossman Spectacle of Suffering iii. 53 The impact of ‘Black Friday’, which bankrupted investment houses and caused twenty-five suicides in New York City alone, extended across the nation.
4. U.S. (A name given to) the day after Thanksgiving, which traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season.
Originally with (humorous) reference to the congestion caused in city centres, esp. Philadelphia (cf. black adj. 11b); later also explained as a day on which retailers' accounts went from being in the red to being in the black (cf. in the black at black adj. and n. Phrases 7).
1961 Public Relations News(N.Y.) 18 Dec. 2 For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday.
1975 N.Y. Times 29 Nov. 21 Philadelphia police and bus drivers call it ‘Black Friday’—that day each year between Thanksgiving Day and the Army-Navy game. It is the busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in the Bicentennial City.
1985 Record(Bergen County, New Jersey) (Nexis) 3 Dec. b1 This is black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of Christmas, the day when Route 46 and route 23 clot with holiday pilgrims.
1994 Star-Ledger(Newark, New Jersey) 25 Nov. 87/3 The Friday after Thanksgiving has been known since World War II as Black Friday... Because that day has traditionally marked the start of the Christmas shopping season, retailers referred to it as the day that the ink on their ledgers turned from red to black.
2006 Wall St. Jrnl. 27 Nov. a1/5 Despite aggressive discounting throughout November and on Black Friday, WalMart Stores Inc. reported its weakest monthly sales in more than 10 years.
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