Days of the week in Arabic: al-aḥad to as-sabt with meanings and IPA

Why the Arabic days are counted from Sunday

Five of the seven Arabic weekday names are numbers. Al-aḥad means the one, al-iṯnayn the two, aṯ-ṯulāṯāʾ the three, al-arbiʿāʾ the four and al-ḫamīs the five, each formed from the root of the number with the definite article al- in front. Sunday is therefore the first day of the Arabic week, and Thursday the fifth.

Wiktionary traces this system to Syriac, the Aramaic language of the Christian Near East. The Syriac names were phrases such as one of the sabbath, two of the sabbath, counting the days after the Jewish day of rest, and Arabic matched each of them with a word of its own built on the same number. Wiktionary calls this a phono-semantic matching: the Arabic word both translates the Syriac and sounds close to it.

The counting stops at Friday. Al-ǧumʿa comes from the root of gathering and names the day of the congregational prayer, the Jumuʿah, as English Wikipedia's article on weekday names notes. As-sabt, Wiktionary explains, is the verbal noun of a verb meaning to rest or to cease, matched with Syriac šabbəṯā and ultimately connected with Hebrew šabbāṯ, the weekly day of rest.

The numbered names replaced an older set. Wiktionary records the pre-Islamic names they displaced, among them awl for Sunday, ahwan for Monday, ǧubār for Tuesday, dubār for Wednesday and muʾnis for Thursday. None of them is in modern use.

The article al- and the word yawm

Every Arabic day name carries the definite article al-, and the article is part of the name. In front of certain consonants its l is absorbed into the next sound: aṯ-ṯulāṯāʾ and as-sabt are said with a doubled first consonant, while al-aḥad and al-ḫamīs keep the l. Arabic writing shows the article the same way in every case, so the difference is heard, not seen.

The name can be expanded with yawm, day: yawm al-ǧumʿa, the day of Friday, is a synonym of al-ǧumʿa in Wiktionary, and yawm al-iṯnayn is used beside al-iṯnayn. The plural of yawm is ayyām, and week is usbūʿ, plural asābīʿ, a word Wiktionary compares with Hebrew šavúaʿ.

Arabic has no capital letters, so the question of capitalisation does not arise. Calendars in Arabic software use the one-letter abbreviations in the table, each a letter of the name: the nūn of al-iṯnayn, the ḫāʾ of al-ḫamīs, the ḥāʾ of al-aḥad. CLDR gives no shorter word forms; the abbreviated and the full names are the same.

When the week starts and the weekend falls in Arab countries

The names say Sunday is day one, but calendars across the Arab world disagree. Unicode CLDR, which phones and computers use to lay out a month, starts the week on Saturday for Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Algeria, on Sunday for Saudi Arabia, and on Monday for Lebanon, Tunisia and Morocco. The same seven names are used everywhere; only the first column of the calendar moves.

The weekend moves too. CLDR records Friday and Saturday as the weekend in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Algeria and the other Gulf states, and Saturday and Sunday in Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. English Wikipedia's article on the working week adds that Morocco and Tunisia work Monday to Friday with a long break at midday, and that the United Arab Emirates moved to a Saturday and Sunday weekend in 2022, keeping Friday as a half working day.

Wiktionary's example sentence for al-ḫamīs says that Thursday is a day off in some Arab countries; the same Wikipedia article describes the reforms of the 2000s and early 2010s that brought much of the Arab world into line with other countries on the days of the weekend. The days of the week table shows the Arabic names beside Swahili, whose Alhamisi and Ijumaa are borrowed from them, and Maltese.