Updated on May 28, 2024
What are the days of the week in French?
Along with knowing the French alphabet and being able to say your name, the days of the week are common vocabulary words that you’ll need to memorize when you start learning French. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to encounter and use them, be it when making a booking at a restaurant, arranging a meeting with friends or colleagues or simply checking your calendar. Beyond knowing the names for the seven weekdays, you’ll also need to become familiar with a few grammatical structures and phrases in order to actually be able to talk about the week in everyday French.
Before we actually give you the names of the seven jours (days) in French, there are a few facts you need to know about them. First, they are all masculine words, though they don’t always need to be preceded by an article, as we will see later. Contrary to English, they also don’t take a capital letter.
Another important difference is the fact that la semaine (the week) starts on Mondays, rather than Sundays. In everyday language, la semaine may sometimes refer to the working week, as opposed to le week-end. It’s also important to notice that la fin de la semaine means “the end of the week”, i.e. Thursday or Friday, rather than “the weekend”. On top of your Saturdays and Sundays, you also have the all-important jours fériés (bank holidays) to take a few breaks during the year.
So here are the seven days of the week. You will notice that they all end in -di, apart from dimanche (Sunday). This suffix comes from the Latin word “dies”, which means “day”. The first part of the word usually comes from a Roman God: Mars in mardi (Tuesday), Mercury in mercredi (Wednesday), Juno in jeudi (Thursday), Venus in vendredi (Friday) and Saturn in samedi (Saturday). Lundi, the word for Monday in French, comes from lune (moon).
| Days in English | Days in French |
| Monday | lundi |
| Tuesday | mardi |
| Wednesday | mercredi |
| Thursday | jeudi |
| Friday | vendredi |
| Saturday | samedi |
| Sunday | dimanche |
You can also practice how to pronounce the days of the week with this video.
Basically, the simple trick is to take the first three letters of the word:
| Days in French | Abbreviation |
| lundi | lun |
| mardi | mar |
| mercredi | mer |
| jeudi | jeu |
| vendredi | ven |
| samedi | sam |
| dimanche | dim |
On calendars, it’s also quite common to see just the first letter to represent each day, even for mardi and mercredi.
As we quickly mentioned, days of the week can be employed on their own, without any article. This corresponds to the use of “on+day of the week” in English:
J’arrive à Paris lundi.
>> I arrive in Paris on Monday.
Alternatively, you can also add ce (“this”) to refer to the upcoming day:
J’arrive à Paris ce lundi.
>> I arrive in Paris this Monday.
You can be a little more specific by adding an expression of time after the word of the day:
| Expression of time | Translation | Example in French | Translation |
| dernier | last | lundi dernier | last Monday |
| prochain | next | mardi prochain | next Tuesday |
| matin | morning | mercredi matin | Wednesday morning |
| après-midi | afternoon | jeudi après-midi | Thursday afternoon |
| soir | evening | vendredi soir | Friday evening |
You can also use the days of the week to talk about routine or recurring activities, by using one of the following three structures. Please note the plural form used for the third one, with the extra -s at the end of the weekday:
| Expression of time | Translation | Example in French | Translation |
| le | the (used instead of “on”) | le samedi | on Saturdays |
| chaque | each | chaque dimanche | each Sunday |
| tous les | every | tous les lundis | every Monday |
Of course, days also appear alongside the months of the year to express dates, as follows:
le + day + cardinal number + month
Example:
Quelle est la date aujourd’hui?
Nous sommes le mercredi 8 mars.
>> What is the date today?
We are Wednesday 8th March.
As you can see, dates in French differ from English as they use cardinal numbers rather than ordinal ones. The only exception is the first of each month, which uses the ordinal number premier (first).
More generally, you can check which day it is by asking one of these questions:
| French | English |
| Quel jour sommes-nous ? Nous sommes jeudi. | Which day are we? We are Thursday. |
| Quel jour est-il aujourd’hui ? C’est vendredi. | What day is it today? It’s Friday. |
| Quel jour est-ce ? C’est samedi. | What day is it? It’s Saturday. |
And there you have it: the seven days of the week in French and a few useful structures to actually be able to ask and give the date, talk about your daily routine or about a particular event on a specific day. These are just some of the many situations when knowing the days of the week will come in handy, even as a beginner.
