An informal United States observance on June 8 dedicated to a person's single closest friend.
National Best Friends Day has no verified creator or founding act. A frequently repeated claim that the U.S. Congress proclaimed it in 1935 is unsubstantiated, with no congressional record behind it, and the day instead became visible in the social-media era as people marked June 8 with tributes to their closest friend.
The two words at the heart of June 8 are older than almost anything else you will say that day. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the noun "best friend" to around 1225, in a Middle English saint's life called St. Juliana. People have been ranking one friend above all the others for roughly eight centuries.
National Best Friends Day puts a date on that impulse. It is not a day for your whole circle. It singles out the one person you would call first, the best-and-worst-of-each-other friend, and it is that narrowness that sets the day apart from the broader friendship observances that crowd the summer calendar.
The strange part is how new the modern shorthand is by comparison. "BFF" did not surface in print until 1978. So the idea is ancient and the slang is recent, and the day sits squarely between them.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Best Friends Day ran on June 8. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
For all its emotional weight, "best friend" was built the plainest way English builds anything: by compounding, bolting the superlative "best" onto the noun "friend." There was no coinage moment, no inventor, just two ordinary words that fused and stuck. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence for the compound runs back to around 1225, in the Middle English text St. Juliana.
What is striking is not just its age but its acceleration. By the OED's frequency data, written use of "best friend" roughly doubled across the late twentieth century, climbing from about 2.4 occurrences per million words around 1970 to roughly 5.0 by 1990. An old phrase quietly became a much more common one.
The three-letter version is far younger than its parent. The OED's earliest evidence for "BFF" is from 1978, in the Albuquerque (New Mexico) Tribune, decades before the texting boom and the pop-culture moments it is usually credited to.
It is a tidy illustration of how language works. The bond stayed the same; people just needed a faster way to sign off to the one friend who counted most, and an old idea got a new abbreviation.
The holiday itself is the youngest and the haziest part of the story. National Best Friends Day has no documented founder and no establishing act. A widely repeated claim that the U.S. Congress proclaimed it in 1935 does not hold up, and retellings cannot even agree on whether that supposed act was about June 8 or about the separate August friendship day.
What is documented is the pattern: the day gained real visibility in the late 2000s and 2010s, when people began marking June 8 on Instagram, Facebook, and X with tributes to a single best friend. It is a Community Origin in the truest sense, a date the public adopted rather than one an authority handed down.
TIMELINE
BY THE NUMBERS
GOOD TO KNOW
About 67 percent say they have a friend they have known since childhood, the raw material of the lifelong best-friend bond the day celebrates.
The app's Best Friends feature ranks up to eight people you message most and updates the list automatically, encoding a bond people once thought of as singular and permanent into software.
The acronym is usually traced to late-1990s and 2000s television, but the OED's first printed evidence is from a 1978 New Mexico newspaper.
When Americans say where they met a close friend, 54 percent cite the workplace and 47 percent cite school, places of repeated, unchosen proximity rather than deliberate searching.
"Best friend" dates to about 1225, Middle English, and survived the centuries-long shift into modern English with its meaning intact.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
A childhood friend makes a best friend far more likely.
Among Americans who have a friend from childhood, 65 percent also have a best friend, compared with just 47 percent of those without one. The bonds formed young are disproportionately the ones that become closest.
Unlike a sibling or a spouse, a best friend is a tie with no ceremony, no contract, and no family obligation behind it. The day marks the rare close relationship that exists purely because two people keep choosing it.
Few relationships get their own dedicated word, yet English has carried a term for the closest friend for some eight centuries and recently minted a three-letter shorthand for it. That persistence is itself a measure of how much the singular bond matters to people.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no government recognition, so banks, schools, and offices stay open.
COLOPHON
An appreciation observance on August 1 celebrating platonic friendships between women and the bonds women share with their closest female friends.
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An appreciation day on October 3 celebrating romantic partners and the relationships people share with their boyfriends.
