vecka

Vecka is the Swedish word for week, a unit of time consisting of seven days used to organize calendars and schedules. In everyday speech Swedes refer to “den här veckan” (this week) or “förra veckan” (last week), and the term appears in phrases describing weekly routines, work weeks, and school terms.

In many European contexts, the week is considered to begin on Monday, and the ISO 8601 standard formalizes this by defining Monday as the first day of the week and assigning week numbers. According to ISO 8601, Week 01 is the first week of the year that contains a Thursday. This system is widely used in calendars, planning tools, and business planning.

Etymology and related usage: the word veck a in Swedish is of Germanic origin and is cognate with terms in other European languages that denote a seven-day period. The concept of a week is ancient and varies in cultural practices, but the seven-day cycle has become a near-universal civil standard in modern times.

Calendar relationships: a common year has 365 days, which equals 52 weeks plus one day; a leap year has 366 days, which equals 52 weeks plus two days. Weeks are typically subdivided into a working week and a weekend in many countries, with Monday through Friday constituting the workdays in several European contexts and Saturday and Sunday forming the weekend. Swedes commonly use the term “veckan” to refer to the current week or to a future week in planning.