Months of the year in French: janvier to décembre

The months of the year in French are janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre and décembre. They take no capital letter, they are all masculine, and a date puts the day first with le in front: le 14 juillet, "the fourteenth of July". Only the first of the month is different: it is le premier mai, "the first of May", and every other day is a plain number.

Updated 2 November 2026 · 10 min read

The months in French

The last column is how many times the word is said per million words of French film and television subtitles.

Four sounds to watch. The j of janvier, juin and juillet is the s of English "measure". Février has three syllables and ends on a clear "YAY"; the r and the i run together, "vree". The s of mars is said, and so is the p of septembre. And the "w" written above for juin and juillet is only an approximation: it is really the French u of tu, said quickly before the next vowel. For juin, Larousse calls a plain "oo" sound dialectal, so aim for the u of tu.

Août: one syllable, two sounds, two spellings

The a is silent. Août is one syllable. In standard French the a is not pronounced: Larousse says so in as many words, and the Trésor de la langue française records "ah-oo" only as old-fashioned, dialectal or familiar. The Trésor gives two pronunciations, "oo" and "oot", and records that the authorities have disagreed about the second: two dictionaries of 1968 accepted both, while the phonetician Pierre Fouché called "oot" archaic or dialectal in 1959. Larousse illustrates it with "oot", as in outil, but also lists ou, "or", and où, "where", as words that sound the same as août, which is the "oo" pronunciation. Both are heard, and either will be understood.

The circumflex is optional. The spelling reform of 1990 made the circumflex accent on i and u optional, keeping it only where it does a job: in some verb endings and in a handful of words such as dû, mûr and sûr, where it tells two words apart. Août is not one of them, so the reformed spelling is aout. Larousse prints both, and the Académie française made the reform a recommendation rather than a rule, so août is still correct. Of every août in French subtitles, 5.7% are typed aout. A count cannot say how many of those are the reform and how many are a keyboard without a circumflex.

The month has its own people, too. Someone who takes their holiday in August is an aoûtien (reformed: aoutien), and someone who goes in July is a juillettiste. Larousse points out the mismatch, and notes that juillettiste lives mostly in the news, in the summer story of le chassé-croisé des juillettistes et des aoûtiens, the crossover of the July and August holidaymakers.

Juin and juillet

They are easy to mix up because they are, in a way, the same word. In Old French, July was juignet, literally "little June": juin with the diminutive ending -et. The Trésor de la langue française explains that this was then reshaped after juil, the older word for July that came from Latin Julius, to give juillet. So juillet still ends like a "little" word.

Where juin itself comes from is less certain. Latin Junius may honour the goddess Juno, or may come from an old word for "junior". Larousse and the Trésor give a third answer, the Junius family, after Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the founders of the Roman Republic; Larousse says "perhaps". The sources disagree, and the table gives the two names most often put forward.

Small letters, masculine nouns

• No capital letter. The Académie française points out that the names of the months, like those of the days, are common nouns, and so are written in lower case. Je suis né en mai, "I was born in May".
• A capital only for a holiday. When a date is the name of a day off, the month takes a capital: le 1er-Mai or le Premier-Mai for Labour Day, le 11-Novembre for Armistice Day, le 15-Août for the Assumption. Larousse adds a hyphen; the Office québécois de la langue française writes le 1er Mai without one, and Larousse notes that this is found too. The plain date never takes a capital: nous nous verrons le premier mai, "we'll see each other on the first of May".
• All twelve are masculine. Larousse gives every one as nom masculin. The words built with mi-, "mid-", are the exception, and they are feminine: la mi-août, à la mi-mai.

How to say the date in French

• Le, the number, the month, the year: le 14 juillet 2027. There is no word for "of": not le 14 de juillet.
• The first is the only ordinal. Le premier mai, written le 1er mai. Every other day is a plain number: le deux mai, le huit mai, le onze novembre. French law writes them the same way: its list of public holidays runs le 1er janvier, le 1er mai, le 8 mai, le 14 juillet, le 11 novembre.
• With the day of the week, the weekday goes between le and the number: le mercredi 22 décembre 2010.
• The year is said in full, as one number: 2027 is deux mille vingt-sept, never split in two the way English says "twenty twenty-seven".
• Mille or mil? In a date, the Académie française allows the older form mil only for one thousand followed by more numbers, so only from 1001 to 1999: mil neuf cent. For 2000 onwards it is always mille: l'an deux mille, deux mille dix. Years from 1100 to 1999 can also be said in hundreds, and the Académie counts neither way as a mistake: 1635 is mille six cent trente-cinq or seize cent trente-cinq.
• Written in figures, the day comes first: 3/5/2027, or 03/05/2027, is the third of May.

To ask the date:

Le combien is a noun made out of "how many", and Larousse gives it exactly this job: asking for the day of the month. To ask for the day of the week instead, see the days of the week in French.

In May, at the start of May

• "In May" is en mai, or au mois de mai, "in the month of May": en avril, au mois d'août.
• At the beginning, middle, end: début mai, à la mi-mai, fin mai. Larousse calls début mai everyday French, very common in business, and suggests au début de mai or au début du mois de mai when you are writing with care.
• "This", "next", "last": ce mois-ci, le mois prochain, le mois dernier.

Dates every French speaker knows

• Le 14 juillet is the national day. It recalls the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the Fête de la Fédération, the festival of national unity held a year later. A law of 6 July 1880 made it the national holiday.
• Le 1er mai is Labour Day, and, in the Office québécois de la langue française's own example, "in France the Premier Mai is inseparable from sprigs of lily of the valley", le muguet.
• Le 1er avril is April Fool's Day, and the joke is a poisson d'avril, an "April fish".
• Le 15 août is the Assumption, a public holiday, and le 11 novembre the Armistice of 1918.

A proverb, and an expression

En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil ; en mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît. "In April, don't take off a single thread; in May, do as you please." The weather is not to be trusted before May. It is also found shortened to its first half, and under the 1990 reform the last word can be spelt plait.

Arriver comme mars en carême, "to arrive like March in Lent", means to come round as surely as March falls in Lent, or to come at just the right time. Larousse marks it as dated and formal, and warns against using it for the opposite, "at the worst moment".

Where the names come from

All twelve names are Roman, and French has had them a long time: the Trésor de la langue française finds nearly all of them in Philippe de Thaon's Comput, a twelfth-century work on reckoning the calendar.

• January is the month of Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings. Janvier comes through a late Latin form, jenuarius.
• February is the month of purification, Latin februarius, from februare, "to purify". Février comes from the spoken Latin form febrarius.
• March belongs to Mars, May to the goddess Maia. The origin of April, Latin Aprilis, is not known for certain.
• July and August were once Quintilis and Sextilis, the "fifth" and "sixth" months, and were renamed for Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus. In Old French August was written aüst or aoust: the a of Latin Augustus has stayed in the spelling, though not in the sound.
• September, October, November and December are "seventh", "eighth", "ninth" and "tenth", from Latin septem, octo, novem and decem. The numbers are two out because the Roman year began in March.

Which month do French films say most?

On the raw count it is mars, at 24.2 per million words, but that figure cannot be trusted: mars is also the planet Mars and the god, and a count of single words cannot tell them apart. Among the other eleven, mai is mentioned most, at 18.0, ahead of septembre at 15.4 and juillet at 13.6. Février is last at 8.1, with janvier just above it. Adding the 0.43 per million typed fevrier, without its accent, does not change that.

September came first in Italian and Portuguese subtitles; French puts May ahead of it. February is last in all three.

Months are mentioned less than days. All twelve together are said about 158.2 times per million words, even with mars inflating the total, against 206.5 for the seven days of the week.

Learn them in a sentence

• Tu es né en quel mois ? — What month were you born in?
• Je suis née en juillet. — I was born in July. (A woman speaking.)
• Nous sommes le premier mars. — It is the first of March.
• À la rentrée, en septembre ! — See you after the summer, in September!
• Le 14 juillet, il y a un feu d'artifice. — On the fourteenth of July there are fireworks.

Dates need numbers, and French ones have a surprise from 70 up: numbers 1 to 100 in French. The months are among the most common French words, and the French course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with dates and recordings, free on the web. For what to write on a card on le premier janvier, see Happy New Year in French.

Sources

• Trésor de la langue française informatisé (CNRTL), pronunciation and etymology of janvier, février, juin, juillet, août, septembre and décembre.
• Larousse, Dictionnaire de français: août, aoûtien, juillettiste, juin, juillet, mai, mars, avril, novembre, premier, combien and début.
• Académie française, Questions de langue: "Jours de la semaine (pluriel et majuscules)", "« An deux mil » ou « an deux mille » ?" and "Nombres (écriture, lecture, accord)".
• Conseil supérieur de la langue française, Les rectifications de l'orthographe, Journal officiel, Documents administratifs, 6 December 1990: rule 4, the circumflex on i and u.
• Wiktionnaire: aout, mi-mai, mi-août and en avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil ; en mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît.
• Office québécois de la langue française, Banque de dépannage linguistique: majuscule aux noms de fêtes religieuses, civiles ou nationales.
• Code du travail, article L3133-1, the list of public holidays.
• Wikipedia: Bastille Day, on 1789, 1790 and the law of 1880; Date and time notation in France; Roman calendar, on the numbered months and the renaming of Quintilis and Sextilis.
• 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_thousand.py and printed from its output rather than typed.