Months in French: janvier to décembre, IPA, abbreviations and dates

Where the French month names come from

Every one of the months in French descends from the calendar of Rome. Janvier comes from Ianuarius, the month of the two-faced god Janus who looks back at the old year and forward to the new; février from Februarius, the month of the purification rites called februa. Mars belongs to the war god Mars, avril continues Aprilis and mai continues Maius.

Two months honour men. Juillet was Quintilis, the fifth month, until the Senate renamed it Iulius after Julius Caesar; août was Sextilis until it became Augustus for the first emperor. French wore Augustus down further than any neighbour: Italian kept agosto and Spanish agosto, while French arrived at a four-letter word pronounced as a single vowel.

The last four names are plain numbers. Septembre, octobre, novembre and décembre mean seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, from a Roman year that once opened in March. When the year start moved to January the names stayed put, so September has been the ninth month for over two thousand years while still carrying the Latin for seven.

Capitals, accents and the circumflex of août

Month names are common nouns in French and start with a small letter: en janvier, le 3 février. The capital appears when the date itself has become the name of a holiday. The Office québécois de la langue française gives le Premier Mai or le 1er Mai for Labour Day and le 11 Novembre for Armistice Day, where Novembre takes the capital because it is the only noun in the name.

Three accents stand in the list: the acute in février and décembre, which marks a closed é, and the circumflex in août. That circumflex records a lost letter: Old French wrote aoust, according to Wiktionary. The spelling reform the Académie française approved in 1990 made the circumflex on i and u optional wherever it does not tell two words apart, so aout without the hat is also correct.

The plural is regular but rare: les janviers de mon enfance, the Januaries of my childhood. In speech the month most often appears after en or after au mois de, both meaning in.

How to write dates with the months in French

French puts the day number before the month and the year last, all without commas: le 14 juillet 1789, le 25 décembre 2026. Only the first of the month takes an ordinal, written 1er and read premier: le 1er janvier. Every other day uses the plain cardinal, le 2 janvier, le deux janvier, where English says the second.

The article le belongs in front of the number. A weekday may stand before it, le mardi 3 mars, again with no comma and no capital. In numeric form France writes 14/07/2026, day first, and the Unicode CLDR data for French gives exactly that short pattern, dd/MM/y. Canadian French in the same data uses the ISO order 2026-07-14, year first, which removes any doubt about which number is the month.

To ask the date, French says quelle est la date aujourd'hui ? or on est le combien ? The reply begins with on est le or nous sommes le: nous sommes le 8 mai. With a month alone, en and au mois de are interchangeable: en août, au mois d'août, in August. Début, mi- and fin give the start, middle and end of a month, début mars, mi-juin, fin octobre.

Saying the months in French: four traps

Août is the shortest and the most argued about. Wiktionary records two pronunciations, [u] like the word où and [ut] with the final t sounded; both are heard in France, and neither is wrong. The a and o of the spelling are silent.

Juin and juillet start with the glide [ɥ], the sound of huit, which English lacks. Juin is a single syllable, [ʒɥɛ̃], and juillet ends in an open [ɛ] with the double l read as a y sound. Février has three syllables, fé-vri-er, with the r and the i pressed together in the middle.

Mars and avril sound their last consonant, against the habit of French to drop it. Septembre keeps its p, unlike sept, seven, where the p is silent; the IPA chart explains each symbol in the table.

The months of the French Republican calendar

For a dozen years France used a second set of month names. The Republican calendar adopted in late 1793 divided the year into twelve months of thirty days with names drawn from nature: Vendémiaire for the grape harvest, Brumaire for mist, Frimaire for frost, then Nivôse for snow, and on through Germinal, the month of sprouting seed, to Thermidor and Fructidor in summer.

Some of these words outlived the calendar. Émile Zola called his 1885 novel of a miners' strike Germinal, and the coup that brought Napoleon to power is still known as the 18 Brumaire. All twelve are set out against the Islamic, Hebrew and other calendars on the page of months in other calendars.