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Days of the Week in German

By Jack Ratcliffe  |  29 October 2026

The seven days of the week in German are Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag (or Sonnabend), and Sonntag. Three of these names point straight back to old Germanic gods, two come from the sun and the moon, one is a leftover from the Jewish Sabbath, and one is just a plain description of where it sits in the week. Unlike English, which kept nearly all of its pagan day names, German swapped one of them out for something far less exciting over a thousand years ago. Here is what each name actually means, why Saturday has two different words depending on where you are in Germany, and how to use all seven correctly in a sentence.

The Seven Days of the Week in German

German days of the week behave a lot like their English cousins once you see them side by side, since both languages grew out of the same Germanic branch. The table below lines up each German day with its literal root and its English equivalent, which makes the pattern easier to spot than reading a plain list.

German	Literal root	English
Montag	Mond (moon) + Tag (day)	Monday
Dienstag	Dingesdag, the Thing's day	Tuesday
Mittwoch	Mitte (middle) + Woche (week)	Wednesday
Donnerstag	Donner (thunder) + Tag (day)	Thursday
Freitag	Frija (the goddess) + Tag (day)	Friday
Samstag / Sonnabend	Sambaztag (Sabbath day) / Sonntag Abend (Sunday eve)	Saturday
Sonntag	Sonne (sun) + Tag (day)	Sunday

A quick note before moving on: every one of these words is masculine in German, so each one takes der when you use it as a plain noun (der Montag, der Dienstag) and am when you are saying something happens on that day (am Montag, on Monday). That pattern never changes, which makes days of the week one of the more forgiving pieces of German grammar to pick up early.

You will sometimes see Donnerstag shortened to Do., Freitag to Fr., and so on in calendars, timetables and shop signs across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Knowing the full words first makes those abbreviations obvious rather than confusing once you start noticing them in the wild.

Where the Names Actually Come From

Five of the seven German day names are not random. Montag and Sonntag are the easiest to see, since Mond (moon) and Sonne (sun) sit right there inside the words, exactly as Luna and Sol do in French lundi and Spanish domingo's older roots. The two celestial bodies that early Germanic peoples watched most closely got the first and last slots in the week.

The other three weekday names borrow directly from old Germanic gods. Donnerstag comes from Donner, meaning thunder, and points to Donar, the German form of Thor, the thunder god shared across the Norse and Germanic pantheons. Freitag comes from Frija, an early Germanic goddess linked to love and the household, who shows up in Old Norse as Frigg. Dienstag is the least obvious of the three. It traces back to the Middle Low German Dingesdag, the day of the Thing, a Germanic legal and political assembly, itself connected to the god Tiwaz, sometimes called Ziu. English Tuesday, Spanish martes and French mardi all preserve the same underlying war-god connection, just through different branches of the family tree.

That leaves Mittwoch and Samstag as the odd ones out, and both have a more interesting story than the five that follow the pattern cleanly. The next two sections cover each one on its own, since they are the two questions learners ask most often once they notice German doesn't quite match English here.

Why Mittwoch Doesn't Follow the Pattern

Before the 10th century, German did have a god-based name for Wednesday: Wodenstag, after Woden, the same figure English speakers still honour every Wednesday. If German had kept that word, it would likely look something like Wodanstag or Wuotanstag today, closer to the English and Dutch versions (woensdag in Dutch keeps the link clearly).

At some point before the modern era, German speakers dropped the god's name in favour of something purely descriptive: Mittwoch, built from Mitte (middle) and Woche (week). It is, quite literally, just "midweek." Nobody is entirely certain why the switch happened, though many historians connect it to the spread of Christianity across German-speaking regions, which had an interest in nudging pagan references out of everyday vocabulary. Whatever the exact cause, the result is that modern German stands apart from English, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages on this one day, even though all of them share the same Germanic root for every other weekday.

It is worth knowing this if you are learning several Germanic languages at once, since Mittwoch is genuinely the exception rather than the rule. Everywhere else in the family, Wednesday keeps pointing back to Woden in some form. German is the outlier, not the other way around.

Samstag or Sonnabend: Germany's Saturday Divide

Saturday is the one day in German that genuinely has two correct, commonly used names, and which one you hear depends heavily on where you are standing. Samstag comes from the Old High German Sambaztag, itself borrowed from Sabbath through Greek and Latin intermediaries, reflecting a Jewish and early Christian idea of the day of rest. It has long been the dominant word across southern and western German-speaking areas, including most of Austria and Switzerland.

Sonnabend, by contrast, literally means Sunday eve, the evening before Sunday, following the same old Germanic logic that also gives English speakers "Christmas Eve" as the evening before Christmas. This word was the standard term for Saturday across much of northern and eastern Germany for generations, and it was the default in the former East Germany specifically, where Samstag sounded distinctly western by comparison. Decades after reunification, Sonnabend is still heard regularly in Berlin and the surrounding region, though Samstag has become the more common choice nationwide, especially among younger speakers and in anything written for a national audience.

If you only learn one word, learn Samstag, since it will be understood everywhere and is what you will see on almost all signage, schedules and official materials. But do not be thrown if someone from Hamburg, Berlin or Leipzig says Sonnabend instead. Both are completely correct German, just shaped by a border that stopped existing decades ago but left its vocabulary behind.

How to Use Days of the Week in a German Sentence

All seven day names are masculine nouns, which keeps the grammar refreshingly consistent once you learn the pattern once. On its own, a day takes der: der Montag, der Freitag, der Sonntag. When you want to say something happens on a particular day, German uses am, a contracted form of an dem, so "on Monday" becomes am Montag and "on Saturday" becomes am Samstag.

To ask what day it is, the standard question is Welcher Tag ist heute?, literally "which day is today." You answer with Heute ist, followed by the day: Heute ist Mittwoch for "today is Wednesday." If you want to talk about recurring events, German adds an -s to the end of the day name to mean "every" that day, so montags means "on Mondays" in general, and sonntags means "on Sundays" as a routine rather than one specific Sunday.

• Welcher Tag ist heute?: What day is it today?
• Heute ist Dienstag.: Today is Tuesday.
• Wir treffen uns am Freitag.: We're meeting on Friday.
• Ich arbeite montags nicht.: I don't work on Mondays.
• Bis Donnerstag!: See you Thursday!

These patterns show up constantly in everyday German, from train timetables to shop opening hours, so getting comfortable with them early pays off far beyond just naming the days correctly in isolation.

Tips for Actually Remembering Them

Rote memorization works for some people, but the days of the week stick far better when you tie each name back to its meaning rather than treating all seven as seven unrelated syllables. Once you know that Montag is moon day and Sonntag is sun day, those two are essentially free. Donnerstag as "thunder day" and Freitag's connection to an old goddess give the middle of the week a bit of a story, which tends to outlast a flashcard you only looked at once.

• Anchor the celestial pair first. Mond and Sonne are words most learners already half-know from elsewhere, so start with Montag and Sonntag before tackling the rest.
• Learn Mittwoch as an exception, not a rule. Treating it as the odd one out, rather than trying to force it into the god-name pattern, actually makes it easier to recall.
• Pick a lane on Samstag versus Sonnabend. Default to Samstag unless you are specifically learning northern German usage, and simply recognise Sonnabend when you hear it.
• Practise the -s ending for routines. Saying montags, dienstags or freitags out loud a few times makes the recurring form feel automatic much faster than reading it silently.
• Use spaced repetition rather than one long cramming session. Short, repeated exposure over several days consistently beats a single hour of review, according to most memory research on vocabulary retention.

However you choose to practise, the goal is the same: the days of the week are seven small, high-frequency words you will use constantly, so the time spent getting them right early is some of the best-value vocabulary work you can do in German. Games built around spatial, context-based vocabulary learning tend to help here too, since hearing am Montag inside an actual scene, rather than on a flashcard, gives the phrase somewhere to live in your memory.

Written by Jack Ratcliffe

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