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Days of the Week in Spanish

By Callan Ratcliffe  |  28 September 2026

The days of the week in Spanish are lunes (Monday), martes (Tuesday), miercoles (Wednesday), jueves (Thursday), viernes (Friday), sabado (Saturday) and domingo (Sunday). The Spanish week starts on Monday rather than Sunday, and none of the day names are capitalized unless they open a sentence, which trips up a lot of English speakers early on. Five of the seven names trace back to the Roman gods the days were originally named after, and the other two come from a completely different source, which is where things get interesting.

The Seven Days of the Week in Spanish

Here they are in order, starting with Monday, along with a rough pronunciation guide. Spanish pronunciation is fairly consistent once you know the rules, so these should get most learners close enough to be understood.

Spanish	Rough pronunciation	English
lunes	LOO-nes	Monday
martes	MAR-tes	Tuesday
miercoles	mee-AIR-coh-les	Wednesday
jueves	HWEH-ves	Thursday
viernes	vee-AIR-nes	Friday
sabado	SAH-bah-doh	Saturday
domingo	doh-MEEN-goh	Sunday

Notice the week starts with lunes, not domingo. Most Spanish-speaking countries follow the Monday-first convention used across Europe and set out in the international ISO 8601 standard, rather than the Sunday-first layout still common on calendars in the United States. If you've ever looked at a Spanish calendar and felt like the weekend was in the wrong place, that's why.

One more detail worth knowing early: all seven days are grammatically masculine, so they always pair with el or los rather than la or las. That matters for the grammar patterns covered further down, and it holds true even for a word like miercoles that doesn't obviously sound masculine or feminine either way.

Where the Spanish Day Names Actually Come From

The Spanish week, like most of the Romance-language week, descends from the Roman planetary week, where each day was named after one of the seven classical celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the Sun. Latin called these dies Lunae, dies Martis, dies Mercurii, dies Iovis, dies Veneris, dies Saturni and dies Solis.

Five Spanish day names kept that pattern almost unchanged: lunes from Luna (the Moon), martes from Marte (Mars), miercoles from Mercurio (Mercury), jueves from Jupiter, and viernes from Venus. If that looks familiar, it's the same underlying system English uses, just with different substitutions. English swapped in Norse and Germanic gods instead of Roman ones for most weekdays: Tuesday from Tiw, Wednesday from Woden, Thursday from Thor and Friday from Frigg, while keeping Saturday, Sunday and Monday closer to their Roman roots.

The two Spanish outliers are sabado and domingo. Sabado, per the Real Academia Espanola, comes from the Latin sabbatum, itself borrowed from the Hebrew Shabbat, so it kept a religious name rather than the Roman dies Saturni. Domingo comes from the Latin dies Dominicus, meaning the Lord's day, which replaced dies Solis (the day of the Sun) under Christian influence. Portuguese followed the same pattern for both days, which is one of the clearer signs of how closely the two languages developed alongside each other.

Capitalization and Basic Grammar Rules

The single most common mistake English speakers make with Spanish days of the week is capitalizing them out of habit. In Spanish, lunes, martes and the rest are written entirely in lowercase in the middle of a sentence, and they're only capitalized when a day name happens to be the very first word of a sentence, exactly the way any other lowercase noun would be.

The definite article does a lot of work that English handles with separate words. El lunes refers to one specific Monday, roughly equivalent to saying "on Monday." Los lunes, using the plural article, means Mondays in general or every Monday, describing something recurring rather than a single occasion. That distinction between el and los is the main grammatical thing to get comfortable with (if noun gender in general still feels shaky, our separate guide on Spanish noun gender covers it in more depth).

In print, Spanish calendars often abbreviate the days as L, M, X, J, V, S, D. The X for miercoles looks odd at first, but it exists specifically because M is already taken by martes, so using M for both Tuesday and Wednesday would be ambiguous on a printed calendar grid.

How to Say "On Monday", "Every Tuesday" and Similar Phrases

To talk about something happening on a specific day, use el plus the day name: el lunes tengo una clase means "on Monday I have a class," referring to this coming Monday or a particular Monday already established in the conversation. There's no separate Spanish word for "on" here the way English needs one; the article does that job on its own.

For something that happens repeatedly, switch to the plural article: los lunes tengo clase means "on Mondays I have class" or "every Monday I have class," describing a standing routine rather than a single event. This is the same el/los pattern from the grammar section above, just applied to full sentences.

A few other everyday combinations are worth learning alongside the days themselves: el proximo lunes (next Monday), el lunes pasado (last Monday), and de lunes a viernes (Monday to Friday, a common way to describe a work or school week). And when someone simply asks que dia es hoy? (what day is it today?), the answer drops the article entirely: hoy es lunes, not hoy es el lunes.

Common Mistakes English Speakers Make

• Capitalizing the day name. Lunes, martes and the rest stay lowercase in the middle of a sentence.
• Dropping the article, or using the wrong one. Spanish doesn't have a direct word for "on" before a day; el or los carries that meaning instead, and mixing them up changes "on Monday" into "every Monday" or the reverse.
• Assuming the week starts on Sunday. Spanish calendars, like most of Europe, start the week on lunes, which can throw off anyone used to a Sunday-first layout.
• Mispronouncing miercoles. The stress falls on the second syllable (mee-AIR-coh-les), and the accent mark over the e is there for a reason, it's not miercoles with even stress throughout.
• Translating "on" literally with "en." Saying "en lunes" instead of "el lunes" is a very common beginner slip carried over directly from English sentence structure.

Tips for Actually Remembering the Spanish Days of the Week

Seven words isn't a lot to memorize on its own, but the pattern behind five of them (Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus) is a genuinely useful shortcut. If you already know a little Roman mythology or astronomy, you effectively already know most of the Spanish week, you just need to attach the Spanish spelling to knowledge you already have.

Formal study resources back this kind of contextual, meaning-first approach over rote memorization. The Instituto Cervantes, Spain's official body for promoting the Spanish language, places everyday vocabulary like days, dates and routines at the very start of its teaching materials, and the Council of Europe's CEFR framework lists exactly this kind of vocabulary under its A1 (beginner) descriptors, the first proficiency level most learners work through.

This is also the kind of vocabulary that sticks best when it's tied to something concrete rather than a bare word list, which is the whole idea behind our own language learning game. In Noun Town, words like the days of the week show up attached to a specific place and moment in a 3D world, with native speaker audio and spaced repetition bringing them back right before you'd naturally forget them, rather than asking you to drill a table like the one above on its own.

Written by Callan Ratcliffe

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