Hoe Singles Day als nieuwe feestdag ontstond

What does “singlesdag” mean in Dutch?

Singlesdag is what Dutch speakers call 11 November — a day for singles to celebrate themselves. The date is no accident: 11/11 written out gives four 1s, and four 1s mean four singles. The word itself is a Dutch hybrid: English singles grafted onto the native suffix -dag (day), a small example of how Dutch casually welds borrowed words onto its own building blocks.

The day started in 1993 when four single male students at Nanjing University decided to turn their status into a celebration, picking 11/11 for its four ones. From there it spread across Chinese universities and later went global as Alibaba turned it into the world’s biggest online shopping event. The clip traces exactly this arc: four students, a mnemonic date, and then online companies stepping in to give the day commercial momentum. In Dutch, dag compounds freely — verjaardag (birthday), feestdag (holiday), werkdag (workday) — so singlesdag slots right in, even though singles is English.