Next next week?

Next next week?

Image by tigerlily713 from Pixabay

Somebody at work keeps using the phrase

next next week

to refer to the week after next. This made me curious. Is “next next” actually correct English? From my search through online discussions by native speakers, it appears that it is not a generally accepted or even very popular expression. Although there is an entry in the Urban Dictionary, it has almost as many upvotes as downvotes. The fact that “next next” is considered incorrect would also explain why I have never heard anyone say “last last week”.

The correct English expressions are (see, for example, here and here)

the week after next

and

the week before last.

Note that the expressions “next but one” and “last but one” (translations of the German expressions übernächste and vorletzte, see also here) are apparently not used in this context.

There are two other interesting variants I came across while living in the UK. People will often refer to a day next week as, for example,

Tuesday week

and a day in the week after next as

Tuesday fortnight.

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