TenDay

Tenday is a historical unit of time describing a period of ten days. In English-language writing, the term appears in various forms, including tenday, ten-day, and ten days, reflecting a common practice of combining a numeral with a time unit. The spelling tenday is now largely archaic, and modern usage typically favors “ten days” or “a ten-day period.”

Etymology and form: Tenday derives from the straightforward concatenation of ten and day. In early modern English, writers frequently formed such compounds to denote specific short intervals without naming calendar months. Over time, the simpler, two-word construction became standard in contemporary usage.

Historical usage: Tenday appears in historical documents, including daybooks, schedules, and travel or military records, where precise short-term intervals were important for planning or accounting. The term was more common in the 16th through 18th centuries and varied in spelling and frequency by region. Today, it is primarily encountered in studies of older texts or in efforts to reproduce period language authentically.

Relationship to other time units: A tenday is longer than a single day and shorter than a fortnight (14 days). It functions as one of several provisional units used in historical timekeeping and scheduling, alongside weeks and months, before modern standardization of time intervals.

Modern usage: In current writing, tenday is rarely used outside of historical discussion, reprints of older material, or stylistic choices in fiction that aim to evoke earlier periods. For practical purposes, ten days or a ten-day period is the preferred form.

See also: Day, Week, Fortnight, Ten days, Decade.