Days of the week in Polish: names, meaning, IPA and grammar

A week counted from Sunday: what the Polish day names mean

Most European weeks carry the gods of Rome or of the North. The Polish week carries numbers. The anchor is niedziela, Sunday, and the other names are measured from it. Poniedziałek is po niedzieli, the day after Sunday: po means after, and Wiktionary breaks the word into po-, niedziela and the suffix -ek. Wtorek comes from wtóry, an old word for second, so Tuesday is the second day. Czwartek is built on czwarty, fourth, and piątek on piąty, fifth.

Środa breaks the counting pattern and keeps the logic. Its Proto-Slavic ancestor *serdà meant both the middle and Wednesday, the middle of the week; Wiktionary compares German Mittwoch, mid-week, which is the same idea in another language. Three days on either side of it, Wednesday sits exactly in the centre of a week that begins on Monday.

The two weekend names have different stories. Sobota is the sabbath: Wiktionary lists the Polish words sabat, szabas and szabat as doublets, words that arrived later from the same Hebrew source by other routes. Niedziela goes back to Proto-Slavic *neděľa, analysed as ne, not, plus dělo, work. Sunday is the day on which one does not work, a meaning that may copy a Greek or Latin phrase for a day of rest, and in several Slavic languages the same word also came to mean a whole week.

Counting from Sunday means the numbers do not fit a week that starts on Monday. Thursday is fourth, yet it is the fourth day after Sunday, not the fourth day of the working week. Learners who try to read the names as positions in a Monday-first week end up one day off, so it helps to remember that the count starts from the day of rest.

Lower case, gender and the sounds hidden in the spelling

Polish dictionaries list the days of the week in Polish in lower case, and the CLDR locale data that phones use prints them the same way. A capital belongs at the start of a sentence or inside the name of a holiday. The Narodowe Centrum Kultury, citing the PWN spelling dictionary, separates the two cases neatly: Poniedziałek Wielkanocny, Easter Monday, is a holiday and takes capitals, while lany poniedziałek, the Easter Monday custom of soaking people with water, is a custom and stays in lower case, like tłusty czwartek, Fat Thursday.

Grammatically the week splits in two. Poniedziałek, wtorek, czwartek and piątek end in a consonant and are masculine. Środa, sobota and niedziela end in -a and are feminine. That difference shows up in every phrase that puts the day into a case, starting with the question of when something happens.

Spelling and sound part ways in a few places. The ł of poniedziałek is pronounced like English w, so the IPA shows [w]. The w at the start of wtorek loses its voice before t and is heard as f, and the same happens to the w after cz in czwartek. The ą of piątek is a nasal vowel in writing, but before t it is pronounced as an ordinary o followed by n. In every one of the seven names the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, the general rule of Polish words.

On Monday, on Tuesday: w, we and the accusative

English on Monday is w poniedziałek in Polish. The preposition w with a day of the week takes the accusative, and Wiktionary's own example is w niedzielę zawsze chodzimy do kościoła, we always go to church on Sundays. For the masculine days the accusative looks exactly like the dictionary form: w poniedziałek, w czwartek, w piątek. The feminine days change their ending from -a to -ę: w środę, w sobotę, w niedzielę.

Tuesday needs one more letter. Before some consonant clusters at the start of the next word, Polish uses the vocalised form we instead of w, as in we Wrocławiu. Wtorek begins with exactly such a cluster, so on Tuesday is we wtorek. Writing w wtorek is a typical learner's error, and it is also hard to pronounce.

For a habit Polish adds w każdy, every: w każdy piątek means every Friday. The question about the day itself is jaki dziś jest dzień?, and the answer simply names it: dziś jest środa, today is Wednesday. For the day before and after, dziś and its partners from the site's word list help: wczoraj, yesterday, and jutro, tomorrow.

Abbreviations of the days of the week in Polish

The Unicode CLDR data for Polish, which computers and phones use to print dates, has three sets of short forms. The abbreviated set ends with a full stop, as Polish abbreviations of this kind do: pon., wt., śr., czw., pt., sob., niedz. Wiktionary records pn. as a second abbreviation for Monday.

A shorter set without full stops, pon, wto, śro, czw, pią, sob and nie, appears where software has only three letters to spare. Calendar grids reduce each day to one letter: p, w, ś, c, p, s, n. Monday and Friday share the letter p, so a printed week can only be read by its position, and the Polish week puts the letters in the order p w ś c p s n.

The Polish week next to its neighbours

The counting system is shared across the Slavic languages, so the days of the week in Russian follow the same plan: Wednesday is the middle day, Thursday and Friday are the fourth and fifth, Saturday is the sabbath. Next door in Germany, Mittwoch, mid-week, is the one German name that thinks the same way as środa.

On the days of the week in many languages table the contrast is easy to see. Romance languages keep the Roman planets, English and German keep Germanic gods, and the Polish row stands with the Slavic group that counts instead. The table also shows that the Polish forms stay close to Old Polish: Wiktionary traces all seven to Old Polish, and six of them already had their modern spelling then; only środa was written śrzoda.