Days of the week in Spanish: lunes to domingo
The days of the week in Spanish are lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado and domingo. They are written without a capital letter, they are all masculine, and the week starts on Monday. Five of them are named after the Moon and four planets, and in Spanish film and television dialogue the one said most is viernes.
The seven days
| English | Spanish | Say it | Named after | Per million words |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | lunes | LOO-nes | the Moon (Luna) | 35.6 |
| Tuesday | martes | MAR-tes | Mars (Marte) | 25.8 |
| Wednesday | miércoles | MYER-ko-les | Mercury (Mercurio) | 20.7 |
| Thursday | jueves | HWEH-bes | Jupiter (Júpiter) | 26.0 |
| Friday | viernes | BYER-nes | Venus | 46.8 |
| Saturday | sábado | SAH-ba-do | the Sabbath | 40.5 |
| Sunday | domingo | do-MEEN-go | "the Lord's day" | 39.6 |
The last column is how many times the word is said per million words of Spanish subtitles.
Two sounds to watch. The j of jueves is a rasp at the back of the mouth, like the ch of Scottish loch, not an English j. And v in jueves and viernes is said like a soft b.
Where the names come from
The Romans named the days after the Sun, the Moon and the five planets they could see, which carried the names of gods. Spanish kept five of the seven. The Real Academia's dictionary traces lunes to Latin for "day of the Moon", martes to "day of Mars", miércoles to "day of Mercury", jueves to "day of Jupiter" and viernes to "day of Venus".
The weekend was renamed by religion. Sábado comes through Latin and Greek from the Hebrew shabbat, and domingo from Latin dominicus, "of the Lord". English went the other way and kept Saturn's day and the Sun's day.
The planets are easy to see once you know them: martes and Mars, miércoles and Mercury, jueves and Jove, viernes and Venus. French and Italian have the same five, so learning one set gives you most of the other two: French, Italian.
How to use them
- No capital letter. Hoy es lunes, "today is Monday".
- "On Monday" is el lunes. Spanish uses the article and no word for "on": Te veo el viernes, "I'll see you on Friday".
- "On Mondays" is los lunes. The five days that end in -s do not change in the plural: el lunes, los lunes. Only the weekend adds an -s: los sábados, los domingos.
- "This", "next", "last": este jueves, el próximo jueves or el jueves que viene, el jueves pasado.
- The weekend is el fin de semana. A weekday is un día laborable.
- Abbreviations on calendars are L, M, X, J, V, S, D. Wednesday is X so that it is not confused with Tuesday.
Which day do Spanish films say most?
Viernes, at 46.8 per million words, ahead of sábado and domingo. Miércoles is last at 20.7, less than half as often. Of the days from Monday to Thursday, Monday is mentioned most.
That pattern is not special to Spanish: Wednesday is the least-mentioned day in all six languages we counted, and Friday leads in four of them. The comparison is in which weekday films mention most. Miércoles has one other use worth knowing: the Real Academia records it as a polite stand-in for a ruder word that begins the same way, much as English says "sugar!".
Learn them in a sentence
- ¿Qué día es hoy? — What day is it today?
- Hoy es martes. — Today is Tuesday.
- Trabajo de lunes a viernes. — I work from Monday to Friday.
- Nos vemos el sábado. — See you on Saturday.
- Los domingos no trabajo. — I don't work on Sundays.
The days are in the most common Spanish words, and the Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with dates and times, free on the web. Counting comes next: numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish.
Sources
- Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española: lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo: the origin of each name, and miércoles as a euphemism.
- 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.pyand printed from its output rather than typed.