Days of the week in Chinese: 星期, 周 and 礼拜

The days of the week in Chinese are numbered: Monday is 星期一 xīngqīyī, "week one", and the count runs to Saturday, 星期六 xīngqīliù, "week six". Sunday has no number. It is 星期天 xīngqītiān or 星期日 xīngqīrì, "week day". The same names can be built on two other words for "week", 周 zhōu (周一, 周二 …) and 礼拜 lǐbài (礼拜一, 礼拜二 …), and you will hear all three. In Mandarin film and television dialogue, Sunday, Saturday and Friday are mentioned almost exactly as often as each other, and Wednesday least.

Updated 26 October 2026 · 11 min read

The seven days

The last column is how many times the day is named per million words of Chinese subtitles, with the 星期, 周 and 礼拜 forms added together.

The "say it" column is only a guide: pinyin x is a light sh made with the tongue behind the lower teeth, and q is a ch made the same way. What it cannot show is the tones. 星期 is two high, level syllables, and each number keeps its own tone after it: 一 yī and 三 sān high and level, 二 èr, 四 sì and 六 liù falling, 五 wǔ low. 天 tiān is high and 日 rì falls.

One rule to know: 一 changes its tone before many syllables (一个 is said yí ge), but not here. At the end of a word, and in ordinal numbers, it stays a first tone, so 星期一 is xīngqīyī with a high, level yī. The rules for 一 are on our page about the Mandarin tones. In quick speech the 期 is often said with a neutral tone, xīngqi.

Three words for "week"

Chinese has three words for "week", and each makes its own set of day names. All three number the days the same way, from Monday as one.

The register column follows the survey of the three words by the writer known as Bathrobe at cjvlang.com, which notes that on the mainland only 星期 and 周 are accepted in ordinary prose and official announcements, and that television subtitles often write 星期 where the speaker said 礼拜. CC-CEDICT marks 礼拜 in the sense of "week" as colloquial, and lists the religious meaning, "to attend a religious service", first.

周 is also an ordinary word for "circle" and "all round", and a common surname, Zhou. Its meaning "week" was borrowed from Japanese around 1900: the researcher Huang Heqing found it in Chinese print in 1901, glossed for readers who would not yet know it as "a few 周, that is, a few 礼拜", and a writer in 1903 still called it the Japanese word for a week.

Sunday: 星期天 or 星期日?

Both are correct and they mean the same thing. 日 rì is "sun" and "day", and is the more formal of the two; 天 tiān is the everyday word for "day" (it also means "sky"). When the days are shortened to a single character, as at the head of a calendar's columns, Monday to Saturday are 一 to 六 and Sunday is always 日, never 天.

In film and television subtitles, 星期天 is used 3.8 times as often as 星期日, and 礼拜天 is also far commoner than 礼拜日. With 周 it is the other way round. 周日 is standard, while 周天 exists but is rare: 周日 is used more than a hundred times as often.

Why Sunday is not 星期七

Nobody counts the days "week one" to "week seven", and the reason is in the oldest of the three systems. When Chinese first called the week 礼拜, "worship", it was naming it after the day Christians went to church. That day was 礼拜日 or 礼拜天, "the day of worship", and the others seem to have been counted off after it: Monday was "worship plus one", Tuesday "worship plus two". Bathrobe calls that the likely explanation rather than a proven one; Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary says the same of the name, that Christians called Sunday 禮拜日 because it was their day of worship, and a week a 禮拜.

When 星期 replaced 礼拜 as the official word, only the first half of each name changed. The numbers stayed, and Sunday kept its "day" instead of a number, which is why 星期日 means, word for word, the rather empty "week day". A trace of the old naming survives in the dictionary: CC-CEDICT gives "Sunday" as one sense of bare 星期 and of bare 礼拜.

Where 星期 came from

Before the Western week, Chinese life was organised in ten-day periods, 旬 xún. A seven-day cycle of planetary day names was known much earlier: it was brought by Manichaeans by the eighth century, and a Buddhist text translated in 759 lists the names. (The Cihai encyclopedia, as quoted on Wikipedia, puts a first appearance as early as the fourth century.) They are based on the seven luminaries, 七曜 qīyào (the Sun, the Moon and the five planets visible to the eye): 日曜日 "Sun day", 月曜日 "Moon day", 火曜日 "Mars day", and so on. Those names never became the everyday week in China, but Japan still uses them: Monday in Japanese is 月曜日 getsuyōbi and Sunday 日曜日 nichiyōbi.

The modern week arrived with Western traders and missionaries in the nineteenth century, and its first Chinese name was 礼拜. Robert Morrison's dictionary of Cantonese, published in 1828, gives 一个礼拜 for "a week".

星期 is older as a word than as a week: it meant the meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl stars, the festival now called 七夕 Qīxī, and Taiwan's national dictionary still lists that sense. Its earliest known use for "week" is in 1889. Why "star" was chosen is told two ways. Bathrobe connects it to the old planetary names; the historian Min Jie traces it to the late-Qing schools that rested on the days of four lunar mansions, 房, 虚, 昴 and 星, which fall seven days apart in the twenty-eight-day cycle, so the "star days" were the weekly rest days.

The dates of the official change are also told differently:

• 1907, according to Min Jie: a Qing government council ruled that the word was 星期, not 礼拜, while defending Sunday as a rest day in schools.
• 1909, according to a 2003 article cited by Huang Heqing, which credits the scholar 袁嘉谷 Yuán Jiāgǔ, then in charge of textbook terminology.
• 1912, according to the linguist Zhang Qingchang, as cited by Huang Heqing, and to Bathrobe: the government gazette of the new Republic used 星期 when it announced the Western week on 10 February 1912.

The sources agree that 礼拜 came first, and on why it lost: it was tied to a foreign religion, and to educated ears it sounded common, where 星期 sounded literary.

How to use them

• Asking the day: 今天星期几？ Jīntiān xīngqī jǐ? "What day is it today?" 几 jǐ is "how many", so the question is literally "today is week which number?". The answer just fills in the number: 今天星期三。 Jīntiān xīngqīsān. "Today is Wednesday."
• No word for "on": a time goes before the verb, either first in the sentence or straight after the subject. 我星期一去。 Wǒ xīngqīyī qù. "I'm going on Monday."
• From … to: 星期一到星期五 xīngqīyī dào xīngqīwǔ, "Monday to Friday", with 到 dào, "until".
• Last week, next week, this week: 上星期 shàng xīngqī or 上个星期, "last week"; 下星期 xià xīngqī or 下个星期, "next week"; 这个星期 zhège xīngqī, "this week". With 周 they are 上周, 下周 and 这周, and also 本周 běn zhōu, "the current week".
• Monday last week, Friday next week: put the same 上 or 下 in front: 上星期一, 下周五.
• The weekend is 周末 zhōumò, "the end of the week". A working day is 工作日 gōngzuòrì.

Subtitles show that the short forms win for "last week" and "next week" even though 星期 wins for the days themselves: 上周 is said 2.3 times as often as 上星期 and 上个星期 together, and 下周 2.4 times as often as 下星期 and 下个星期. 周末, at 53.5 per million words, is said more often than any single day.

In Taiwan

Taiwan writes traditional characters, so 周 is 週 and 礼拜 is 禮拜; 星期 is the same in both. In simplified characters 週, "week", is written 周, which is why mainland Chinese uses one character for both "week" and "circle".

The pronunciation differs too. Taiwan's standard says xīngqí, with a rising second syllable, where the mainland standard says xīngqī. And 禮拜 is more at home there: Bathrobe notes that in Taiwan it is not only common in speech but also found in writing, giving the Harry Potter translations as an example, where the mainland edition keeps to 星期 and the Taiwanese one uses both.

The subtitle lists cannot confirm that. Counting each word together with the day names built on it, the traditional-character list has 20 uses of 禮拜 for every 100 of 星期, about the same as the simplified list's 20. Subtitles are written, and Bathrobe's point that subtitlers write 星期 where a speaker said 礼拜 applies to them too. The traditional list is also every subtitle written in traditional characters, not only Taiwan's.

Which day do Chinese films say most?

With all three systems added together, Sunday (33.2 per million words), Saturday (32.7) and Friday (32.1) are almost level, and Wednesday is last at 15.6. Split by system, the picture changes slightly:

Each figure is per million words of the simplified-character subtitle list; the highest of the three systems for each day is in bold. 星期 forms make up 49% of all the day names, 周 forms 46% and 礼拜 forms 4%. Within 星期, Sunday is the most-mentioned day; within 周, it is Saturday, and 周 is ahead of 星期 for Saturday and Tuesday. Wednesday is the least-mentioned day in both. The 礼拜 numbers are too small to rank.

How these were counted, and what that cannot show:

• Only whole day names were counted. The list was cut into words before it was counted, and the cutting usually kept 星期一, 周一 and 礼拜一 as one word each. Where it split one into 星期 and 一, the day is lost to the count; 星期几 is never kept whole, so the question "which day?" could not be counted at all.
• Bare 周 and bare 礼拜 were not counted. 周 is also "circle" and a surname, and 礼拜 is also "worship". Only the day names built on them count.
• 周日 is not always Sunday. CC-CEDICT records it as a dialect word for "weekday" too.
• Most of these subtitles are translated, mainly from English films, so they show what translators write, which leans towards 星期 and 周.

The same count across six languages is in which weekday films mention most: Wednesday is last in every one.

In Shanghainese

Shanghainese builds the week on 礼拜, not 星期. Our Shanghainese word list has 礼拜 li pa for "week" and 礼拜天 li pa thie for "Sunday"; the rest of the days, the time and the date are in Shanghainese time, dates and money.

Learn them in a sentence

• 今天星期几？ Jīntiān xīngqī jǐ? — What day is it today?
• 明天星期六。 Míngtiān xīngqīliù. — Tomorrow is Saturday.
• 我星期一到星期五工作。 Wǒ xīngqīyī dào xīngqīwǔ gōngzuò. — I work Monday to Friday.
• 周末你做什么？ Zhōumò nǐ zuò shénme? — What are you doing at the weekend?
• 下个星期见！ Xià ge xīngqī jiàn! — See you next week!

The days are in the most common Mandarin words, and the Mandarin course teaches them with dates and times, free on the web.

The same seven days in five European languages, with the gods and planets behind their names: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

For a card at the end of the year, with 圣诞快乐 word by word and wishes to copy, see Merry Christmas in Chinese.

Sources

• Bathrobe, "Days of the Week in Chinese: Three Different Words for 'Week'", cjvlang.com: the three systems and their registers, 日 more formal than 天, 礼拜 and the day of worship, the ten-day 旬, the Taiwanese xīngqí and Taiwan's written use of 禮拜, and the 1912 gazette.
• 黄河清 (Huang Heqing), 从七曜说到“礼拜”、“星期”、“周”的语源 (On the origins of 礼拜, 星期 and 周, from the seven luminaries), huayuqiao.org, archived: the planetary day names in the eighth century and the translation of 759; 礼拜 for "week" in Morrison's Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect, 1828; 星期 as the Cowherd and Weaver festival, and for "week" in 1889; 周 from Japanese in 1901 and 1903. It cites 张清常, 说“礼拜”, 语言文字应用 1993 no. 4, pp. 2–4 (the gazette of 10 February 1912), and 雁寒, “星期”的由来, 咬文嚼字 2003 no. 3, p. 27 (1909 and 袁嘉谷).
• 闵杰 (Min Jie, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), 星期日公休制度的实行 (The introduction of the Sunday rest day), 中华文史网, archived: the rest days on 房, 虚, 昴 and 星, and the 1907 ruling for 星期 over 礼拜.
• Ministry of Education (Taiwan), Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary (重編國語辭典修訂本), through moedict.tw: 星期 xīng qí, its sense 七夕, and 禮拜 and 禮拜天 as the Christian day of worship.
• CC-CEDICT, cc-cedict.org (also served by MDBG): the day names under 星期, 周 and 礼拜 with their pinyin; 礼拜 as colloquial "week" and "Sunday"; 星期 as "Sunday"; 週 as the traditional form of 周 "week"; 周日 as dialect "weekday"; 周天, 周末, 工作日, 上星期, 下星期, 上个星期, 下个星期, 上周 and 星期几.
• Wikipedia, Names of the days of the week: the seven luminaries, the Japanese names and the Cihai entry; 天 as the more colloquial ending; calendars abbreviating Sunday with 日 only; the neutral-tone xīngqi.
• Wikipedia, Standard Chinese phonology: x and q as alveolo-palatal sh and ch; 一 keeps its first tone at the end of a word and in ordinals.
• Wikipedia, Twenty-Eight Mansions: the order of the mansions, which puts 房, 虚, 昴 and 星 seven places apart.
• AllSet Learning, Chinese Grammar Wiki, Time words and word order: a time word goes at the start of the sentence or directly after the subject.
• Verbavia's Shanghainese word list, app/src/main/assets/shanghainese_vocab.csv: 礼拜 li pa and 礼拜天 li pa thie.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists for simplified (zh_cn) and traditional (zh_tw) Chinese, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and scripts/frequency_zhdays.py and printed from their output rather than typed.