Four-day bridge weekends are commonplace in non-English speaking countries, but there are only a couple of examples in English-speaking countries: In the United States, the fourth Thursday of November is Thanksgiving, a public holiday on which most workplaces are closed; many workplaces remain closed the following day to create a four-day weekend.
The Monday is not a public holiday, but many people modify their work arrangements to also have the Monday off and many schools will have a "pupil free day", so it is colloquially referred to as the "Cup Day long weekend".
Italians use the idiom Fare il ponte: literally, "make the bridge".
An ordinary weekend is conceived of as "round" (although this is not stated explicitly), and adding extra days off makes it "oval".
Norwegians also refer to "inneklemte" (squeezed in) days, which are between a public holiday and a weekend.
There is, however, no automatic entitlement to time off on a bank holiday under British labour laws, and thus not everyone benefits from long weekends.
If an employee is entitled to time off on a bank holiday, it may count towards their 5.6 weeks-equivalent of statutory annual leave, though many companies offer bank holidays as an addition to employees' contracted annual leave entitlement.
In the United States, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act officially moved federal government observances of many holidays to Mondays, [1] largely at the behest of the travel industry.
[2] A well-known four-day weekend starts with Thanksgiving and Black Friday after.
In Argentina, some national holidays that occur on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (sometimes even on a Saturday) are officially moved to the closest Monday in order to create a long weekend.
In the latter case, workers may take it off on account on vacation days, an action called "tomarse el sandwich" (lit.