Days of the week in German: Montag to Sonntag

The days of the week in German are Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag and Sonntag. They are written with a capital letter, like every German noun, they are all masculine, and the week starts on Monday. Six of the seven end in -tag, "day", and the one said most in German film and television dialogue is Freitag.

Updated 14 October 2026 · 3 min read

The seven days

The last column is how many times the word is said per million words of German subtitles; Saturday's count includes Sonnabend.

Three sounds to watch. A g at the end of a word is said as k, so every -tag ends in "tahk". An s before a vowel at the start of a word is the English z: Samstag, Sonntag. And the ch of Mittwoch is the rasp of Scottish loch.

Where the names come from

German days are close cousins of the English ones, because both translated the Roman week into Germanic. Montag is "Moon-day" and Sonntag "Sun-day", translations of the Latin names. Donnerstag is the day of Donar, the god the Norse called Thor, which is why English has Thursday; Donner is still the German word for thunder. Freitag, like Friday, is named for a goddess, Frigg or Freya, whom the Germanic peoples matched to the Roman Venus. Dienstag, like Tuesday, goes back to a Germanic god.

Two days break the pattern. Mittwoch is simply "middle of the week", a translation of church Latin, where English kept Woden's day. And Samstag comes from the Sabbath, through Latin and Greek, where English kept Saturn's day.

Samstag or Sonnabend?

German has two words for Saturday. Samstag is the usual one, and the one to learn. Sonnabend, literally "Sunday eve", is used in the north and east. In German subtitles Samstag is more than twenty times as common as Sonnabend.

How to use them

• Capital letter, always. Heute ist Montag, "today is Monday".
• "On Monday" is am Montag. Am is an dem: Wir sehen uns am Freitag, "see you on Friday".
• "On Mondays" is montags, with a small letter and an -s, because it is now an adverb: Montags arbeite ich nicht, "I don't work on Mondays". The same works for every day: dienstags, mittwochs, sonntags.
• "This", "next", "last": diesen Montag, nächsten Montag, letzten Montag.
• The weekend is das Wochenende, and "at the weekend" is am Wochenende.
• Abbreviations are the first two letters: Mo, Di, Mi, Do, Fr, Sa, So.

Which day do German films say most?

Freitag, at 33.0 per million words, with Sonntag and Samstag next. Mittwoch is last at 14.3, less than half as often. Of the days from Monday to Thursday, Monday is mentioned most.

Wednesday is the least-mentioned day in every language we counted; the comparison is in which weekday films mention most.

Learn them in a sentence

• Welcher Tag ist heute? — What day is it today?
• Heute ist Dienstag. — Today is Tuesday.
• Ich arbeite von Montag bis Freitag. — I work from Monday to Friday.
• Bis Samstag! — See you on Saturday!
• Sonntags schlafe ich lange. — On Sundays I sleep late.

The days are in the most common German words, and the German course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with dates and times, free on the web. Counting comes next, and German counts backwards after twenty: numbers 1 to 100 in German.

The other half of any date is the month: months of the year in German.

Sources

• Wiktionary (German), the Herkunft section of Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, Sonnabend and Sonntag, which cite Pfeifer's Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen and the Duden Herkunftswörterbuch.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed.