happy hour

US origin, 1950s.^[1]

• Audio (US):

  (file)

happy hour (countable and uncountable, plural happy hours)

1. A time of day, usually in the afternoon or early evening, when a bar or pub offers its drinks at a discounted price.
   • 1988, Heywood Gould, Cocktail (motion picture), spoken by Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise):

     Yes, happy hour. A great American invention for spending quality time with spouse, soused.

2. Any small gathering, usually in the afternoon or early evening, set aside to relax and have a drink.
3. (Cockney rhyming slang, in the plural) Flowers.

In normal English usage, the term happy hour is used to refer to the daily period of reduced prices, regardless of its length. The plural is only used to refer to separate happy hour spans (e.g., I have been to three happy hours at this bar.) or to happy hours at different establishments (e.g., Which bars in town have the cheapest happy hours?). The practice, common in some languages (notably French), of pluralizing the borrowed expression in reference to a period longer than one hour (e.g., happy hours de 16h à 18h) is unidiomatic in English.

• happy hour on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “happy hour n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present

Unadapted borrowing from English happy hour.

happy hour m or f (plural happy hours)

1. happy hour (period in the late afternoon or evening when pubs offer discounts)

Unadapted borrowing from English happy hour.

• IPA^(key): /ˌxapi ˈauɾ/

happy hour m (plural happy hours)

1. happy hour

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.