Days of the week in Portuguese: segunda-feira

The days of the week in Portuguese are segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira, sábado and domingo. Portuguese is the only major Romance language that does not name its working days after the Moon and the planets. It numbers them: Monday is "second", Tuesday "third", and so on to Friday, "sixth". They take no capital letter, and in everyday speech the -feira is usually dropped.

Updated 14 October 2026 · 4 min read

The seven days

The pronunciations are Brazilian. A final o is said "oo", and ç is always an s sound.

Why Monday is "second"

The count starts from Sunday. In the calendar of the Church, Sunday is the first day of the week, so Monday is the second and Friday the sixth.

Feira comes from Latin feria. Priberam's dictionary gives its origin as the Latin for days of rest, holidays; in church Latin it became the ordinary word for a day of the week, and feria secunda was Monday. The other Romance languages kept the Roman names instead: Spanish lunes and Italian lunedì are still the Moon's day, and martes and martedì still belong to Mars.

The change is traditionally credited to Martin of Braga, a sixth-century archbishop in what is now northern Portugal, who objected to naming days after pagan gods and used the Church's numbering in their place. In the rest of western Europe the old names survived; in Portuguese the numbers won.

Sábado and domingo are the same as everywhere else in the Romance world: the Sabbath, and "the Lord's day". The planet names that Portuguese dropped are in Spanish, French and Italian.

How to use them

• Drop the -feira in speech. Segunda is Monday, sexta is Friday: Até sexta!, "see you Friday!".
• The five working days are feminine, because feira is: a segunda-feira, na segunda ("on Monday"), na próxima quarta ("next Wednesday"). Sábado and domingo are masculine: no sábado, no domingo.
• "On Mondays" is às segundas in Portugal and às segundas or nas segundas in Brazil; for the weekend days, aos sábados, aos domingos.
• The plural adds -s to both halves: segundas-feiras.
• No capital letter: Hoje é terça-feira, "today is Tuesday".
• The weekend is o fim de semana.
• On calendars the days are often written 2ª, 3ª, 4ª, 5ª, 6ª, which only makes sense once you know they are numbers.

One trap follows from the numbering. Segunda, quarta, quinta and sexta are also the ordinary words for "second", "fourth", "fifth" and "sixth" (in the feminine), and quinta is a farm or estate as well. Context decides: na quinta is almost always "on Thursday".

What the films show

A word count can only partly measure Portuguese weekdays, for exactly that reason: bare segunda is both Monday and "second". What can be counted is the full hyphenated form, in the subtitles of Portugal:

Friday is first and Wednesday last, with Monday second. That is the same shape as in every other language we counted, where Wednesday is always the least-mentioned day: see which weekday films mention most. Sábado (38.0) and domingo (34.2) are higher still, but they are whole counts set against partial ones.

Learn them in a sentence

• Que dia é hoje? — What day is it today?
• Hoje é quarta-feira. — Today is Wednesday.
• Trabalho de segunda a sexta. — I work from Monday to Friday.
• Até sábado! — See you on Saturday!
• Aos domingos eu descanso. — On Sundays I rest.

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

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

Sources

• Priberam, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa: feira (from Latin feria, days of rest), segunda-feira, sábado and domingo.
• Wikipedia: Names of the days of the week, on Martin of Braga and the numbered days of Portuguese.
• 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.