Which weekday do films mention most? Friday

Friday is the most-mentioned day of the week in Spanish, French, Italian and German film and television subtitles. In English and Mandarin it is Sunday, by a small margin. Wednesday is the least-mentioned day in all six languages we counted, and Monday is the most-mentioned of the working days in every one. Three days, Friday to Sunday, take more than half of all the mentions.

Updated 14 October 2026 · 5 min read

The seven days in six languages

Each figure is how many times the day is named per million words of subtitles. The highest in each row is in bold.

The pattern is the same shape in every language: a peak on Monday, a dip to Wednesday, a climb through Thursday, and the three highest figures at the end of the week.

Friday or Sunday?

Friday leads in four languages, and its lead is clearest in Spanish, where viernes is said 46.8 times per million words against 40.5 for sábado and 39.6 for domingo.

In English and Mandarin, Sunday is ahead, but the top three days are nearly level. English has Sunday at 39.9, Friday at 37.7 and Saturday at 37.3. Mandarin has them at 33.2, 32.1 and 32.7. With gaps that small, the safe statement is about the group, not the winner: in every language, Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the three most-mentioned days, and together they are between 53.5% (German) and 58.2% (English) of all the day names said.

Wednesday is the day nobody mentions

Wednesday is last in all six. The most-mentioned day is named between 2.1 and 2.6 times as often as Wednesday, depending on the language. Tuesday and Thursday sit just above it, close together.

Monday is different. It is well ahead of the other working days everywhere: in English, Monday is said 28.5 times per million words against 19.2 for Tuesday.

A count cannot say why. The simplest reading is that people on screen name a day when they are planning around the weekend or dreading the start of the week, and the middle of the week is neither.

Mandarin has three ways to say each day

Mandarin numbers its days. Monday is "week one", Tuesday "week two", and so on to Saturday, "week six"; Sunday ends in 天 or 日, both "day". But there are three words for "week" to build them on, and the subtitles use all three:

The Mandarin row in the main table adds all three together. A learner needs to recognise 星期 and 周 equally; 礼拜 is far rarer in these subtitles.

Why Portuguese is not in the table

Portuguese names its five working days with ordinal numbers: segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira, "second" to "sixth". In speech the -feira is often dropped, and bare segunda is also simply the word "second", so a word list cannot tell the day from the number.

What can be counted is partial. The European Portuguese list has the hyphenated forms, and Friday leads them: sexta-feira at 23.1 per million against 16.4 for segunda-feira and 11.1 for quarta-feira, the lowest. So Portugal's working days show the same Monday, Wednesday and Friday pattern as everyone else's. Sábado (38.0) and domingo (34.2) are higher, but they are whole counts set against partial ones, so we have not ranked them. The Brazilian list has no hyphenated forms at all.

What was counted

• Spellings are added up. Italian subtitles often write venerdi without its accent, and Spanish ones sabado, so both spellings count. German Sonnabend, the northern word for Saturday, is added to Samstag.
• Singular only. Sundays and los domingos are left out, so that a day is not helped by having a commoner plural.
• Names are in the count. Friday is also Robinson Crusoe's companion, Domingo is also a surname and half of Santo Domingo, and several days are in film titles. Nothing in a word list separates those.
• Translations. Most subtitles in every language but English are translations of English-language films, so five of these six rows are partly the same films, translated. That the six agree so closely is less surprising than it looks.
• Esperanto is left out: its corpus is only 403,882 words.

For learners

None of the day names is among the first thousand words of any of these languages. They are worth learning early anyway, because they come as a set of seven and you need them to make any arrangement. Spanish, French and Italian write the day names without a capital letter; German capitalises them, as it does every noun.

The same kind of count for love, money, dogs, cats, coffee and tea is in love or money: what films say most. The commonest words of all are in the word lists for Spanish, French, Italian, German and Mandarin, and Verbavia (our own course) teaches each of them from that list, free on the web. Days in two languages outside these corpora are in Māori numbers, days and months and Shanghainese time, dates and money.

Each language's seven days, with pronunciation and where the names come from, have a page of their own: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every count is computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed: each day's count, with the spellings listed above added up, divided by the total of all counts in that language's list.
• CC-CEDICT, entries 星期, 周 and 礼拜 (week) and the day names built on them. cc-cedict.org