Days of the week in French: lundi to dimanche, IPA and abbreviations

Why five French days end in -di

Six of the days of the week in French, Monday to Saturday, hide the Latin word dies, day, at their end. Latin said Lunae dies, Martis dies, Mercurii dies, Jovis dies and Veneris dies, the days of the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. Spoken Latin in Gaul worn down over a thousand years turned the pairs into single words, and the old dies survives only as the closing -di of lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi and vendredi.

Saturday took a different road. Its source is a Vulgar Latin sambati dies, the day of the sabbath, with a nasal m that came in through a Greek variant sambaton (Wiktionary and the Online Etymology Dictionary both trace it this way). The result, samedi, still ends in -di, so a learner hears six days in a row with the same final syllable.

Only Sunday breaks the rhyme. Church Latin called it dies dominicus, the Lord's day, and French dropped the dies at the front, keeping the adjective: dominicus became dimanche. English kept the older pagan Sun and Saturn names for its weekend, French kept the Christian ones.

Catalan, spoken just over the Pyrenees, built its week the other way round, with the day word at the front: dilluns, dimarts, dimecres. Comparing the two shows the same Latin pair read from opposite ends.

Small letters, plurals and the abbreviations

The days of the week in French are written with a lower-case initial, in the middle of a sentence and in a date alike: on se voit jeudi, le samedi 14 mars. A capital belongs only at the start of a sentence. Holiday names keep the weekday small and capitalise the feast, as in lundi de Pâques, Easter Monday, the example the Office québécois de la langue française gives.

Unlike their Spanish cousins, the French day names take an -s in the plural, as every regular noun does: les lundis, tous les mercredis, les samedis et dimanches. The Office québécois de la langue française notes one traditional exception. When a day is followed by matin, soir or après-midi, the pair was long treated as invariable, des lundis matin, though agreement there is increasingly accepted.

The official abbreviations come in two sets. The three-letter forms lun., mar., mer., jeu., ven., sam. and dim. always end in a full stop. One-letter codes, L M M J V S D, carry no stop and are written in capitals. Tuesday and Wednesday share the letter M, so a printed French week has two Ms side by side and the reader tells them apart by position alone.

How to use the days of the week in French sentences

The difference between lundi and le lundi is the first thing to learn. Without an article, a weekday means the nearest one, past or coming: je pars lundi, I'm leaving on Monday, this Monday. With le it becomes a habit: le lundi, je travaille à la maison, on Mondays I work from home. English uses on for both, so English speakers often add le where French wants a single day.

Tous les lundis is the strongest way to say every Monday. Lundi prochain and lundi dernier mean next and last Monday; ce lundi points to the Monday of the current week. A full date puts the day first, then the number, then the month, all without capitals: le mardi 3 mars, or simply mardi 3 mars on a letter heading.

To ask the day, French says quel jour sommes-nous ? or, more casually, on est quel jour ? The answer uses the bare name: on est vendredi. For a span, du lundi au vendredi covers Monday to Friday, and en semaine means on weekdays. The weekend is le week-end in France, with a hyphen, while Quebec usage prefers la fin de semaine.

A small trap sits in the vowels of samedi and vendredi. The e in the middle is written but usually not spoken in samedi, giving two syllables, while vendredi keeps three because the cluster dr needs a vowel after it.

French days of the week across France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec

The seven names are spelled identically in every French-speaking country, and the Vitrine linguistique of Quebec lists the same lun., mar., mer. abbreviations used in France. Differences lie in the vowels and the surrounding words. Many speakers in northern France, Paris included, make no difference between the nasal vowel of lundi, [œ̃], and the one in vin, [ɛ̃], so lundi often sounds like [lɛ̃di]; Wikipedia's article on French phonology notes that Belgian French keeps the two apart.

Quebec adds touches of its own around the days. Fin de semaine is the usual word there for the weekend, where France says le week-end, and Canadian French teaching material lists both.

Regional languages and creoles have their own forms built on the same Latin roots. Walloon, spoken in southern Belgium, says londi, mårdi, mierkidi, djudi, vénrdi, semdi and dimegne. Haitian Creole has lendi, madi, mèkredi, jedi, vandredi, samdi and dimanch, the French names reshaped to Creole spelling; the Haiti page gives the country in both languages. The IPA chart explains the symbols in the table above.

Which day starts the French week

In France, Belgium and Switzerland the week begins on lundi, and calendars put Monday in the first column, in line with the ISO 8601 standard that numbers Monday as day 1 and dimanche as day 7. The Unicode CLDR locale data for French uses the same Monday start, so phones and computers set to French build their calendar grids that way.

Mercredi has a place of its own in French life. For decades many French primary schools gave pupils Wednesday afternoon off, so le mercredi became the day for sport, music lessons and outings, and new films still open in French cinemas on a Wednesday, a custom agreed between distributors and cinema owners.