Months of the year in German: how to say them

The months of the year in German are Januar, Februar, März, April, Mai, Juni, Juli, August, September, Oktober, November and Dezember. They are written with a capital letter, like every German noun, and they are all masculine: der Januar, der Mai. Most look like their English cousins; the differences are in how they are said and how they fit into a date.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 5 min read

The twelve months

The last column is how many times the word is said per million words of German subtitles.

Four sounds to watch. J is the English y, so Januar, Juni and Juli start with "y". Z is "ts": März ends in it and Dezember has it in the middle. August the month is stressed on the second syllable, ow-GOOST, where the man's name August is stressed on the first. And an s before a vowel at the start of a word is the English z: September.

Where the names come from

All twelve names are Roman. The Romans named the first months of their year for gods and festivals, and then ran out of ideas and counted.

• January is the month of Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings, and February is named for februa, a festival of purification held in it.
• March belongs to Mars, May to the goddess Maia and June to Juno. The origin of April, Latin Aprilis, is not known for certain.
• July and August were once Quintilis and Sextilis, the "fifth" and "sixth" months. They were renamed for Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus.
• September, October, November and December are simply "seventh", "eighth", "ninth" and "tenth", from Latin septem, octo, novem and decem.

The numbers are two out because the early Roman year began in March. When January became the first month, the names stayed where they were, so the "seventh" month is now the ninth. German took the names from Latin and changed them very little.

Austria says Jänner

In Austria the first month is Jänner, not Januar, and Feber is used there for February, mainly in official language. In film and television subtitles, which mostly follow German usage, both are rare: Jänner appears 0.04 times per million words.

How to use them

• Capital letter, always. Ich habe im Mai Geburtstag, "my birthday is in May".
• "In May" is im Mai. Im is in dem, and it is used with every month: im Januar, im Dezember.
• A date takes am and an ordinal number: am 3. Mai, said am dritten Mai, "on the third of May". The full stop after the number is how German writes "third".
• Saying what the date is: Heute ist der 3. Mai, said der dritte Mai.
• "From … to …": von Juni bis August. "Since": seit März. "At the beginning, middle, end of": Anfang Mai, Mitte Mai, Ende Mai, with no word for "of".
• "This", "next", "last": diesen Monat, nächsten Monat, letzten Monat.
• Dates are written day first, with full stops: 3.5.2027 is the third of May.

Juni and Juli sound alike down a bad phone line, so Germans sometimes say Juno and Julei to keep them apart, in the same way that they say zwo for zwei.

The seasons

The seasons are masculine too, and take im like the months: im Sommer, im Winter.

Which month do German films say most?

On the raw count it is April, at 21.2 per million words, but that figure cannot be trusted: April is also a woman's name in the American films that fill the subtitle collection, and a word count cannot tell the two apart. August has the same problem with the man's name.

Among the months with no such double, Mai is the most mentioned, at 16.2, and Februar is last of all twelve at 8.0. February is also the least-mentioned month in Italian and Portuguese subtitles.

Months are mentioned less than days. All twelve together are said about 149.5 times per million words, fewer than the seven days of the week, which are counted in the days of the week in German.

Learn them in a sentence

• Wann hast du Geburtstag? — When is your birthday?
• Ich habe im Juli Geburtstag. — My birthday is in July.
• Heute ist der 3. Mai. — Today is the third of May.
• Wir sehen uns im September. — See you in September.
• Am ersten Januar ist Neujahr. — The first of January is New Year's Day.

Dates need numbers: numbers 1 to 100 in German has them all. The months are among the most common German words, and the German course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with dates and times, free on the web. The hundred words said most of all are explained in the 100 most common German words.

Another set every beginner needs: colours in German, ranked by how often films say each one.

Sources

• Wiktionary (German), the Herkunft section of Januar, Februar, Juli and August, and the entries Jänner, Feber, Juno and Julei.
• Wikipedia: Roman calendar, on the year that began in March, 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.