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When it's a holiday and some company/firm/business-place is temporarily closed, How do you express that?

For example:

Bob: I'm going to the Apple Store on Queens Road tomorrow, care to join me?

Alice: I think that Apple Store is ____ tomorrow.

I don't know if using closed here is quite right, because it's temporary and I'd like to say it's only because of the holiday. So I'm looking for a more precise word to express "temporarily closed because of the holiday".

Update: In my native language (Persian), We have a single word to describe a place that is temporarily closed just because it's a holiday. It's different than "closed" because they can be "closed" for various reasons but when you use that word it means they are particularly closed because of the holiday. I was hoping to find an equivalent in English.

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  • Seeing the question's title I thought it might be about a seasonal business.
    – Anton Sherwood
    Sep 18, 2023 at 21:22

8 Answers 8

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29

While closed is correct and the most common, the people of (at least) Great Britain also use the word shut

In which case, to say that a store is shut today suggests that it is only temporary.

There again, you could just use " the store is not open today" to mean the same thing.

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  • Well, I'm British, and I am not convinced that "shut" carries any meaning different to "closed". Indeed saying somewhere "has shut" might well means that it has closed completely - to my mind.
    – WS2
    Jan 30, 2023 at 14:22
45

It's fine to say "closed" to just mean "not open", eg "The shop is closed on Sundays.". To avoid confusion between temporary closure and permanent closure, when a shop goes out of business people would often say it has closed down.

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  • 2
    Very nice point about closed down, please see my update as well.
    – Sobhan
    Apr 6, 2016 at 7:52
  • Re your update, as far as i'm aware there isn't a special word meaning "closed for the day".
    – Max Williams
    Apr 6, 2016 at 8:11
  • closed today implies temporary. Also, saying is closed on Easter if today is Easter would imply the same.
    – AbraCadaver
    Apr 6, 2016 at 15:33
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    Just the word "has" before "closed" is sufficient to mean permanently, or indefinitely. It could also mean closed for the day or before a holiday, but that would be known from context - such as if you were racing to get there knowing it would be closing soon. In that case I would add "already".
    – user126158
    Apr 6, 2016 at 16:05
  • +1 As a native Am.E. speaker, when we want to specify that something is closed today we will just say exactly that - "X is closed today." The 'shut' usage suggested in the other answer is definitely Br.E. specific and would be much more likely to cause confusion in Am.E. Just saying "X is closed" without further qualification will rely on the context to imply why it's closed.
    – reirab
    Apr 8, 2016 at 3:47
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The answer is closed. When a shop is not open it is closed, irrespective of the reason - holiday, fire, renovation, bankruptcy, epidemic of plague etc.

And the comment from @568ml is pertinent. If you say it is closed, without further qualification such as -"tomorrow", "on Mondays", "until the end of the month" etc. it could be taken to mean that it is closed permanently.

Clearly the latter would not necessarily be the case if you said something like I just came from there and it is closed. That would simply report the fact that at that moment it was closed.

At least that's the position in Britain.

And as regards your update: That is interesting about the Persian. In Britain we would say something like it is closed for the bank holiday. (A bank holiday just means a public holiday - like Good Friday or Easter Monday)

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8

If you want to get technical then you can use the word observing followed by the actual holiday.

Observe:

  1. to show regard for by some appropriate procedure, ceremony, etc.: to observe Palm Sunday.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/observing

Usage:

Bob: I'm going to the Apple Store on Queens Road tomorrow, care to join me?

Alice: I think that Apple Store is observing {insert holiday} tomorrow.

or you can be firmly direct and leave nothing to interpretation:

Alice: I think that Apple Store is closed in observance of {insert holiday} tomorrow.

I think that plenty of people would understand the use of observe/observing but I do not know if it is widely used. In the U.S., if you simply say it's closed tomorrow then people will usually deduce that it's due to a holiday.

To satisfy naysayers, here is a city's website in Texas:

enter image description here

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4

Not specific to a holiday -- but if you say "place is not open" instead of "place is closed", then the implication of temporary status is much stronger.

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Other answers have noted that "closed" is the general term. However, if you're looking to communicate that the holiday is expressly the reason, there is a way to do so by implication:

Bob: I'm going to the Apple Store on Queens Road tomorrow, care to join me?

Alice: But it's Memorial Day.

Simply pointing out the holiday is usually enough to imply that the business in question observes it.

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    But it's Memorial Day. doesn't imply that something is closed. It just implies that there is something special happening, e.g. maybe another store has a sale.
    – BanksySan
    Apr 6, 2016 at 16:49
  • I agree with BanksySan, unless it is common knowledge / practice that (most) shops / stores close on Memorial Day.
    – TrevorD
    Apr 12, 2016 at 18:22
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In my family we say that the place is "chiuso". Because in Italy, every day seems to be a holiday and places are closed more often than they are open. It has the sense that the owners just felt like taking some time off and enjoying the sunshine, so they shut up shop.

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  • Hmmm.... no longer true nowadays, in Italy more and more local shops are open after lunchtime, and all the big supermarkets are open 7 days a week. It used to be a much slower pace of life, shops opened earlier and people would buy their daily bread and newspaper at six in the morning. This has all changed in the last 25 years. Some Italian cities have moved faster with the times than others, too.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Apr 8, 2016 at 8:09
  • That's sad. I thought the Italians understood that life is for enjoying.
    – Michael Kay
    Apr 9, 2016 at 19:53
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Another way of noting it would be to stress the day - for example "I think they're closed today", or "The Apple Store won't be open tomorrow"; the addition of the day or period would indicate that the closure is just for that time.

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