Months in Italian: gennaio to dicembre, IPA, dates and il primo

From Latin to Italian: how the month names changed

All twelve Italian month names come from Latin, and Wiktionary gives the source of each one. What makes them look different from English is the sound history of Italian, which turned Latin consonant clusters into double consonants. Latin Octōbrem became ottobre, Septembrem became settembre, and the ct and pt clusters disappeared into tt. Augustus came through Vulgar Latin agustus and lost its au to become agosto.

Several names went through a stage with i before a vowel. Latin Iūnius gave giugno, with the Latin I turned into the Italian sound of gi. Maius became maggio. Gennaio, Treccani explains, comes from (mensis) Ianuarius, Late Latin Ienuarius, the month dedicated to Janus, and its older Italian form was gennaro. Treccani also notes that January was the eleventh month in the old Roman calendar, whose year began on 1 March, and became the first month from the middle of the 2nd century BC.

Luglio is the most curious. Wiktionary derives it from Latin iūlius through dissimilation, the loss of the first of two similar sounds, and records the obsolete regional form giuglio as the expected one. Every other month kept its Latin consonants in some form.

Lower case, gender and the article

Italian writes the months in lower case, in mid-sentence and in dates alike: a gennaio, il 15 agosto, settembre 2026. The English-language overview of Italian date notation gives the reason: months and weekdays are not treated as proper nouns. Only the beginning of a sentence or the name of a festivity takes a capital.

All twelve months are masculine nouns. On their own they normally appear without an article: a giugno fa caldo, it is hot in June. In a month is a or in: a marzo, in marzo.

The months have no plural in everyday use; Wiktionary labels most of them uncountable. Mese, month, is the general word, with the plural mesi: tre mesi, il mese prossimo, il mese scorso.

How to write a date in Italian

Italian writes the day, the month and the year in that order, each without a capital: 2 giugno 2026. A date takes the definite article: il 2 giugno, l'8 marzo, with the article elided before a vowel. With a preposition the article fuses, so on 2 June is il 2 giugno and from 2 June is dal 2 giugno. The year alone takes the article too: nel 2026, in 2026.

The first of the month is the exception. English Wikipedia's article on Italian date notation says it is usually written 1º dicembre or 1° dicembre and read il primo dicembre, the first of December; l'uno dicembre exists but is considered unsatisfactory or wrong. Every other day uses the cardinal number, so il due giugno, il quindici agosto, never il secondo giugno.

In figures the order stays day, month, year, with a stroke: 2/6/2026, or with leading zeros 02/06/2026, which is the short format CLDR prints for Italy. Letters put the place first: Roma, 2 giugno 2026. The bureaucratic li before the date, as in Firenze, li 15 giugno, survives from an old plural article and is best avoided, according to the same article.

The full date with the weekday follows the CLDR pattern martedì 3 marzo 2026. Read aloud it becomes martedì tre marzo duemilaventisei.

Ferragosto and other month words in Italian

The best-known month word in Italian is ferragosto, the holiday of 15 August. Wiktionary derives it from Latin feriae Augusti, the August holidays; the word is often written with a capital, Ferragosto.

Months combine into ordinary adjectives and nouns. Wiktionary lists settembrino (of September) and marzolino (of March), and the word mensile, monthly, from mese. The months of the year table gives the Italian names next to those of Latin, Spanish and the other Romance languages, and the Romance word list shows the related words for day, week and year.