Days of the week in Hindi: seven names in Devanagari, IPA and usage

Seven planets: where the Hindi day names come from

Each Hindi weekday is a planet's day. Sanskrit vāra means a turn or a day of the week, and Hindi took the seven compounds over as learned borrowings: somavāra became somvār, maṅgalavāra became maṅgalvār, and so on down the list. The first half of each name is the heavenly body that rules the day: Soma or the Moon, Maṅgala or Mars, Budha or Mercury, Guru or Bṛhaspati for Jupiter, Śukra for Venus, Śani for Saturn and Ravi for the Sun.

The order is the same as in English, Latin and Greek, and that is no coincidence. Wiktionary's etymologies trace somavāra to a calque of Greek hēméra Selḗnēs, the day of the Moon, and maṅgalavāra to hēméra Áreōs, the day of Ares. The seven-day planetary week reached India from the Hellenistic world and was given Sanskrit names for the same planets in the same sequence. Moon-day in Hindi and Monday in English are two translations of one Greek idea.

Thursday has two names because Jupiter has two. Guru, the teacher, is the everyday word, so guruvār is what calendars and timetables print. Bṛhaspati is the older name of the god who is the planet's teacher, and bṛhaspativār sounds formal or religious. Sunday also has a pair: ravivār is the Sanskrit form, while itvār descends through Prakrit āittavāra from Sanskrit ādityavāra, another name for the Sun's day, and is heard constantly in speech.

Writing the days of the week in Hindi: script, gender and plurals

Devanagari has no capital letters, so the question of upper or lower case that troubles Spanish and French learners does not arise. A Hindi weekday looks the same at the start of a sentence, inside it and on a calendar. Two letters deserve a second look. The ृ in बृहस्पतिवार is the vowel sign ṛ, pronounced ri in modern Hindi; the conjunct क्र in शुक्रवार joins k and r without a vowel between them.

All seven names are masculine nouns of the consonant-stem type. Their singular forms never change, and the plural changes only in the oblique case, which is the form used before a postposition: सोमवार in the singular, सोमवारों (somvārõ) before को or में in the plural. That plural turns up in sentences about habits, such as सोमवारों को on Mondays.

When Hindi is written in Urdu script the same words appear as سوموار, منگلوار and so on, and Urdu-leaning speech adds names of Persian and Arabic background. Wiktionary records जुमा (jumā) as a synonym for Friday and जुमेरात (jumerāt) for Thursday, and पीर (pīr) as a rare word for Monday.

Abbreviations and the order of the week

Hindi shortens a weekday by dropping -vār: सोम, मंगल, बुध, गुरु, शुक्र, शनि, रवि. These are the abbreviated forms in the Unicode CLDR data that phones and operating systems use to print Hindi dates, and they are also how many people say the days aloud. On narrow calendar grids CLDR goes down to one syllable: र सो मं बु गु शु श, starting from Sunday.

That starting point matters. CLDR records Sunday as the first day of the week for India, and Indian wall calendars and diaries commonly open the week on रविवार. The international standard ISO 8601 counts Monday as day 1, and the table above follows it by starting with सोमवार. Check the first column before reading a date off a printed Indian calendar.

How to say on Monday and every Monday in Hindi

English on becomes the postposition को (ko), placed after the day: बुधवार को means on Wednesday, the example Wiktionary gives for this use of ko. The same word that marks a recipient in मेरे भाई को (to my brother) marks a point in time here, just as शाम को means in the evening.

For a habit, put हर (har, every) in front, or use the oblique plural: हर सोमवार every Monday, सोमवारों को on Mondays. A sentence that simply names the day needs no postposition at all: आज शुक्रवार है, today is Friday.

Hindi word order is subject, object, verb, and the time phrase usually comes early in the clause. To ask the day of the week, Hindi says आज कौन सा दिन है? Literally that is: today which day is? The answer drops in the name: आज मंगलवार है.

Common mistakes with Hindi weekday names

Dropping the final -vār in writing reads as an abbreviation, fine on a timetable but clipped in a sentence. Spelling शनीवार with a long ī, or गुरूवार with a long ū, is a frequent slip; the standard forms have short vowels, शनिवार and गुरुवार. Mixing registers when writing the days of the week in Hindi, such as गुरुवार in one line and बृहस्पतिवार in the next, is not wrong but sounds uneven.

Learners who know Urdu or Punjabi will meet near relatives of these names. Marathi and Gujarati use the same Sanskrit compounds with their own pronunciation, for example Marathi मंगळवार and Gujarati મંગળવાર for Tuesday, and the Indian scripts comparison shows how the same letters look across the region. The days of the week in many languages table places the Hindi row next to Urdu, Bengali and Nepali.