Portuguese · português · Latin script
Days of the week in Portuguese: segunda-feira to domingo, with IPA
The days of the week in Portuguese are segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira, sábado and domingo. Monday to Friday are counted, second to sixth day, and in conversation the -feira is usually dropped: segunda, terça, quarta.
The days of the week in Portuguese, Monday first
Two IPA columns, because Brazil and Portugal pronounce the names differently: the IPA column gives the Brazilian transcription, the last column the European one, both from Wiktionary's Portuguese entries. Abbreviations are the Brazilian Portuguese set of the Unicode CLDR locale data, with the one-letter calendar form after the dot.
| English | Portuguese | IPA Brazil | Abbr. | IPA Portugal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | segunda-feirasegunda | /seˌɡũ.dɐˈfe(j).ɾɐ/ | seg. · S | /sɨˌɡũ.dɐˈfɐj.ɾɐ/ |
| Tuesday | terça-feiraterça | /ˌteʁ.sɐˈfe(j).ɾɐ/ | ter. · T | /ˌteɾ.sɐˈfɐj.ɾɐ/ |
| Wednesday | quarta-feiraquarta | /ˌkwaʁ.tɐˈfe(j).ɾɐ/ | qua. · Q | /ˌkwaɾ.tɐˈfɐj.ɾɐ/ |
| Thursday | quinta-feiraquinta | /ˌkĩ.tɐˈfe(j).ɾɐ/ | qui. · Q | /ˌkĩ.tɐˈfɐj.ɾɐ/ |
| Friday | sexta-feirasexta | /ˌses.tɐˈfe(j).ɾɐ/ | sex. · S | /ˌsɐjʃ.tɐˈfɐj.ɾɐ/ |
| Saturday | sábado | /ˈsa.ba.du/ | sáb. · S | /ˈsa.bɐ.du/ |
| Sunday | domingo | /duˈmĩ.ɡu/ | dom. · D | /duˈmĩ.ɡu/ |
The short form under each weekday is the everyday spoken name. In the Brazilian IPA, (j) marks a glide that many speakers drop, so feira often sounds like fera; ʁ is the Brazilian r of terça and quarta, ɾ the tapped r of Portugal.
Why Portuguese numbers its weekdays
Among the Romance languages, the days of the week in Portuguese stand alone. Every other one keeps the Roman gods in its weekdays: Spanish lunes, French lundi, Italian lunedì for the Moon's day. Portuguese counts instead. Segunda-feira comes from Ecclesiastical Latin secunda fēria, the second weekday, and the pattern runs through terça (third), quarta (fourth), quinta (fifth) and sexta (sixth). The count starts from Sunday, which the Church treated as the first day.
The change is credited to Martin of Braga, the sixth-century bishop of Bracara Augusta, today Braga in Portugal. Wikipedia's article on him records that he objected to naming the days after gods, and that through his influence Portuguese and Galician, then one language, took their weekday names from numbers and the liturgy. Galician has since largely returned to the older names; Portuguese kept the numbers.
The planetary names did exist. Wiktionary's etymologies note that segunda-feira displaced an earlier lũes, terça-feira displaced martes, quarta-feira mércores and quinta-feira joves, the same Moon, Mars, Mercury and Jupiter that survive in Spanish. Saturday and Sunday were never numbered: sábado comes from Latin sabbatum and through Greek from Hebrew shabbat, and domingo from Late Latin diēs Dominicus, the day of the Lord.
Lower case, hyphen, gender and plural
Portuguese writes the days of the week in lower case. The 1990 Orthographic Agreement, in force in Brazil and Portugal, lists the names of days, months and seasons among the words that take a small initial letter, and its own example is segunda-feira. A capital appears only at the start of a sentence or in a holiday name such as Sexta-feira Santa, Good Friday.
The five numbered days are compounds written with a hyphen and are feminine, because feira is feminine: a segunda-feira, uma quinta-feira. Sábado and domingo are masculine: o sábado, o domingo. In the plural both halves of the compound change, segundas-feiras, the form Wiktionary gives, and sábados and domingos simply add -s.
In speech and in most informal writing the -feira falls away. Wiktionary lists segunda as a synonym of segunda-feira, and the shortened names keep their feminine gender: na segunda, on Monday.
How to say on Monday in Portuguese
On is em fused with the article: na for the feminine days and no for the masculine ones. Na segunda-feira, na sexta, no sábado, no domingo. For a habit the plural takes à or às in Portugal and Brazil alike, with às segundas meaning on Mondays; aos sábados and aos domingos do the same for the weekend.
Ranges use de … a: de segunda a sexta, Monday to Friday, shortened in writing to seg. a sex. Between two days the article goes, so a timetable reads de terça a domingo.
To ask the day, Portuguese says Que dia é hoje? The answer has no article: hoje é quarta-feira, today is Wednesday.
| Portuguese | English |
|---|---|
| Hoje é segunda-feira. | Today is Monday. |
| Vou ligar-te na quinta. | I'll call you on Thursday (Portugal). |
| Vou te ligar na quinta. | I'll call you on Thursday (Brazil). |
| Às sextas jantamos fora. | On Fridays we eat out. |
| A loja abre de segunda a sábado. | The shop opens Monday to Saturday. |
| Que dia é hoje? | What day is it today? |
The second and third rows show a difference in word order: European Portuguese attaches the pronoun after the verb with a hyphen, Brazilian Portuguese puts it before.
Brazilian and European differences
The names are identical on both sides of the Atlantic; the sound is not. Portugal reduces unstressed vowels sharply, so segunda begins with a barely audible sɨ-, and pronounces feira with a diphthong [ɐj] that Brazilians do not use. Brazilians keep the vowels fuller and often reduce feira to fera. Sexta-feira shows the biggest gap: [ˈses.tɐ] in much of Brazil, [ˈsɐjʃ.tɐ] in Portugal, where s before a consonant is a sh-sound.
Software reflects a difference in abbreviations. CLDR's Brazilian data abbreviates the days as seg., ter., qua. and so on, while its European Portuguese data uses the spoken short names, segunda, terça, quarta, as its abbreviated set. On narrow calendar grids both use the letters D S T Q Q S S, starting from Sunday.
That starting point is shared too. CLDR's week data gives Sunday as the first day of the week for Brazil, Portugal and Mozambique. ISO 8601 starts on Monday, and the table above follows it by listing segunda-feira first.
Questions about the days of the week in Portuguese
What are the days of the week in Portuguese?
Segunda-feira (Monday), terça-feira (Tuesday), quarta-feira (Wednesday), quinta-feira (Thursday), sexta-feira (Friday), sábado (Saturday) and domingo (Sunday).
Why are Portuguese weekdays numbers?
Because the church counted the days from Sunday, and Martin of Braga in the sixth century pushed for those numbered names in place of the pagan gods.
What does feira mean in segunda-feira?
It comes from Latin fēria, a church weekday. Segunda-feira is the second weekday counting from Sunday.
Are the days of the week capitalized in Portuguese?
No. Under the 1990 Orthographic Agreement the days of the week in Portuguese are written in lower case.