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birthday

nounverbtop 1 000 in film dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɜːθ.deɪ//
  • United Kingdom//ˈbɜːθ.dei//
  • Canada//ˈbɝθˌdeɪ//

The anniversary of the day on which someone is born.

noun

  1. 1

    The anniversary of the day on which someone is born.

    When's your birthday? Mine's on April 1.

    I'll be thirty-seven (years old) next birthday.

    Oliver Twist's ninth birthday found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference.

    1906, Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children, Chapter 9: The pride of Perks, "And we thought we'd make a nice birthday for him. He's been so awfully jolly decent to us, you know, Mother," said Peter, "and we agreed that next bun-day we'd ask you if we could."

  2. 2

    The anniversary of the day on which something is created.

  3. 3

    The date on which someone is born or something is created, more commonly called birthdate or date of birth.

  4. 4

    A birthday party.

    I'd like to invite you all to my birthday.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-West Germanic *gaburdidag Old English ġebyrddæġ Middle English birthdai English birthday From Middle English birthdai, birtheday, from Old English ġebyrddæġ (“birthday”), influenced by Old Norse burðr, equivalent to birth + day. Compare Saterland Frisian Gebuursdai (“birthday”), Dutch geboortedag (“birthday”), Low German Geboortsdag (“birthday”), German Geburtstag (“birthday”), Norwegian bursdag, gebursdag (“birthday”). Eclipsed non-native Middle English nativitee (“birth, nativity, birthday”), from Old French nativité, nativited, from Latin nātīvitas.

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo celebrate one's birthday.

Forms

plural
birthdays
past tense
birthdayed
past participle
birthdayed
present participle
birthdaying
third person singular
birthdays
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).