Months of the year in Spanish: enero to diciembre

The months of the year in Spanish are enero, febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre, octubre, noviembre and diciembre. They are written with a small letter, they are all masculine, and a date puts the day first and joins the parts with de: el 5 de mayo de 2027, "the fifth of May 2027". In Spanish film and television dialogue the month said most is julio, though not only because of July, and the one said least is febrero.

Updated 2 November 2026 · 8 min read

The twelve months

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

Three sounds to watch. The j of junio and julio is a breathy rasp, close to an English h, which is why the two start "hoo". The v of noviembre is said like a soft b. And the z of marzo and the c of diciembre are an s in Latin America and the Canary Islands, but in most of Spain they are the th of "think": MAR-tho, dee-THYEM-breh.

Capital letters, gender and septiembre

• No capital letter. The Academies' spelling rules write the month with a small letter, in the middle of a sentence as in a date: Nací en marzo, "I was born in March". A month takes a capital only where anything would, at the start of a sentence.
• All twelve are masculine, so the words around them are too: el próximo marzo, "next March"; un agosto muy caluroso, "a very hot August".
• Septiembre or setiembre? Both are correct. FundéuRAE, the usage advice service sponsored by the Real Academia Española and the news agency EFE, answers that setiembre is right, "although the Academies point out that educated usage prefers septiembre". Wiktionary and Spanish Wikipedia both describe setiembre as the usual spelling today in Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay; for Argentina they disagree, Wiktionary listing it among the countries that use it and Spanish Wikipedia calling the country divided, with some people writing it freely and others thinking it vulgar. The short form is not a modern shortcut, either: it is the older of the two, and septiembre is a learned respelling that put back the p of Latin September.

In Spanish subtitles setiembre is said 0.81 times per million words, 4.7 per cent of the two spellings together. The subtitle list mixes Spain and Latin America without saying which is which, so it cannot show where each spelling is used, only that septiembre is far more common on screen.

How to say the date in Spanish

Spanish puts the day first and adds two small words.

• Day, month, year, joined by de: 5 de mayo de 2027. The month stays lower case and neither de is dropped. The written order recommended is always day first; mayo 5 de 2027, the American order, is advised against.
• "On" a date is el: El 3 de abril de 1973, Martin Cooper salió a una acera de la Sexta Avenida de Manhattan, "On 3 April 1973, Martin Cooper stepped out onto a pavement on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan", as CNN en Español began its story of the first mobile phone call. Saying what today is needs no article: Hoy es 9 de noviembre.
• The year is read as one whole number, not split in two as English does: 2027 is dos mil veintisiete and 1910 is mil novecientos diez. From 2000 on, both de 2027 and del 2027 are correct. Written down, a year never has a point or a space: 2027, not 2.027.
• The first of the month has two forms. The ordinal, el primero de mayo, is the form preferred in the Americas; the cardinal, el uno de mayo, is more common in Spain. From the second onwards every day is a plain number: el dos, el tres, el treinta y uno.
• To ask the date: ¿Qué fecha es hoy? is "What's the date today?" ¿A cuántos estamos?, literally "at how many are we?", asks the same thing, and the answer can be just the day: Hoy es 14, "It's the 14th".
• In figures, day, month and year are separated by a slash, a hyphen or a point, with no spaces: 5/5/2027, 5-5-2027, 5.5.27. The spelling rules prefer no leading zero (4/2/98 rather than 04/02/98) unless a form or a computer demands one. So 4/2 is the fourth of February, never the second of April.
• Abbreviated, the months are ene., feb., mar., abr., may., jun., jul., ago., sept. (or sep.), oct., nov. and dic., each with its full stop and still in small letters.

In May, early May, late May

• "In May" is en mayo: Me caso en junio, "I'm getting married in June".
• Early, mid, late: a principios de mayo, "at the beginning of May"; a mediados de mayo, "in the middle of May"; a finales de mayo or a fines de mayo, "at the end of May".
• "This", "next", "last": este mes, el mes que viene or el próximo mes, el mes pasado. With a month's name: el próximo julio, el pasado enero.

Where the names come from

All twelve are Roman, and the Spanish forms show how Latin wore down over the centuries. Ianuarius, the month of Janus, passed through Old Spanish janero and jenero before it became enero. Febrero is a half-learned rewriting of an older hebrero. Diciembre comes through Old Spanish deziembre from Latin decem, ten, the same root as diez. Agosto comes through spoken Latin agustus from the emperor's name, and julio from Iulius, which is also the man's name Julio.

The last four months were numbered. The early Roman year began in March, so September was the seventh month, October the eighth, November the ninth and December the tenth. July and August were once Quintilis and Sextilis, "fifth" and "sixth": Quintilis was renamed for Julius Caesar after his death, and Sextilis for Augustus in 8 BC.

Why the year moved to January is disputed. Plutarch credited the early king Numa; Ovid said January began as the first month and February the last. One part of the change, though, has a Spanish connection. From 153 BC the Roman consuls took office on 1 January rather than in March, and Livy's summary of that year gives the reason as a rebellion in Hispania. A war in Spain is part of the reason septiembre, the "seventh", is the ninth month.

South of the equator

In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay the seasons run the other way round from Spain's. The summer months are diciembre, enero and febrero, and the winter months junio, julio and agosto, and Christmas falls in summer. In Argentina and Paraguay 21 September is celebrated as the start of spring, with a Day of Youth.

Which month do Spanish films say most?

Julio, at 25.3 per million words. But julio is also the man's name Julio, and a julio is a joule, the unit of energy, and a count of single words cannot tell the three apart. So the figure for July is a ceiling, not a measurement. Set it aside and mayo leads, at 18.7, ahead of septiembre and abril. Mayo has a second meaning too, a maypole, so its figure is a ceiling as well.

Febrero is last at 9.9, behind enero and diciembre. February is also last in Italian, German and Portuguese subtitles, which says more about what films talk about than about Spanish.

The count for agosto includes a phrase worth knowing: hacer su agosto, literally "to do one's August", means to make a killing. Wiktionary traces it to the harvest that August brought in, or more recently to the summer trade of holiday resorts.

All twelve months together are said about 182.9 times per million words, fewer than the seven days of the week.

Learn them in a sentence

• ¿En qué mes naciste? — What month were you born in?
• Nací el primero de julio. — I was born on the first of July.
• ¿Qué fecha es hoy? — Hoy es 3 de mayo. — What's the date today? — It's the third of May.
• Nos vemos a finales de septiembre. — See you at the end of September.
• Mi cumpleaños es en agosto. — My birthday is in August.

The months are in the most common Spanish words, and the Spanish course teaches them with dates and times, free on the web.

A date needs a number and often a weekday: numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish has every number a date can use, and the days of the week in Spanish goes from lunes to domingo.

Sources

• FundéuRAE, Cómo se escriben las fechas: day–month–year order, lower-case months, de 2024 or del 2024, primero (preferred in the Americas) and uno (more frequent in Spain), separators and leading zeros, the year read in words.
• FundéuRAE, Los años, sin punto ni espacio, citing the Ortografía de la lengua española.
• FundéuRAE, septiembre / setiembre: both correct, educated usage prefers septiembre.
• Spanish Wikipedia, Septiembre: setiembre preferred in Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay, divided usage in Argentina, citing the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas; 21 September as the start of spring in Argentina and Paraguay.
• Wiktionary: enero, febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, Julio, agosto, septiembre, setiembre, octubre, noviembre, diciembre, hacer su agosto, a finales de, a fines de and mediados: gender, etymology, abbreviations, the second meanings of julio and mayo, the idiom, and the 1973 example sentence (quoted there from CNN en Español).
• SpanishDictionary.com: ¿A cuántos estamos? and ¿Qué fecha es hoy?, with their example answers.
• Wikipedia: Roman calendar, on the gods and numbers behind the names, the year that began in March, the renaming of Quintilis and Sextilis, and the accounts of Plutarch and Ovid; Livy, Periochae 47.13–14, on livius.org, for 153 BC and the rebellion in Hispania.
• Wikipedia: Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives, on seseo and distinción; Season, on the southern hemisphere's summer from December to February.
• 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.