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The twelve months of the year in French are janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre and décembre. Nine of these words trace straight back to Ancient Rome: four honour Roman gods, two were renamed after Roman rulers, and four are simply old Latin numbers left over from a calendar that used to start in March. Only avril keeps a genuinely uncertain origin. French kept almost the entire naming system the Romans built more than two thousand years ago, changing the spelling but rarely the meaning. Here is what each name actually comes from and how to use all twelve correctly in a sentence.
Short answer: janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre. Four are named after Roman gods (Janus, Mars, Maia, Juno), two after Roman rulers (Julius Caesar, Augustus), and four are just the Latin numbers seven to ten, left over from a ten-month Roman calendar that began in March.
Lined up against their Latin roots, the French month names stop looking like twelve words to memorise separately and start looking like a pattern with only a handful of exceptions. The table below shows each French month next to the Latin word it grew out of and its English equivalent, which makes the shared ancestry across the two languages obvious at a glance.
| French | Latin root | English |
|---|---|---|
| janvier | Ianuarius, from the god Janus | January |
| février | Februarius, from Februa, a purification festival | February |
| mars | Martius, from the god Mars | March |
| avril | Aprilis, origin uncertain | April |
| mai | Maius, from the goddess Maia | May |
| juin | Iunius, from the goddess Juno | June |
| juillet | Originally Quintilis, fifth month, renamed for Julius Caesar | July |
| août | Originally Sextilis, sixth month, renamed for Augustus | August |
| septembre | septem, seven | September |
| octobre | octo, eight | October |
| novembre | novem, nine | November |
| décembre | decem, ten | December |
Two details trip up learners before they even get to the etymology. French never capitalises month names unless they open a sentence, which looks unusual to English speakers used to writing January with a capital letter. Months are also all masculine, so you say le mois de janvier rather than anything feminine, even though several of the names honour goddesses rather than gods.
You will also run into shortened forms on French calendars and forms: janv., fevr., mars (already short enough to leave alone), avr., mai, juin, juil., août, sept., oct., nov. and dec. Learning the full words first makes these abbreviations easy to recognise rather than confusing once you spot them on a printed calendar or a date field.
Four of the twelve months are named directly after Roman deities, and the choices were not random. Janvier comes from Janus, the two-faced god of doors, beginnings and transitions, which made him the obvious namesake for the month that looks back at the year ending and forward at the one starting. Mars, the war god, gave his name to the month that mattered most in the oldest Roman calendar: before January and February existed at all, mars was the very first month of the year, since it marked the point when Roman armies resumed campaigning after winter.
Mai and juin are less certain but still point toward goddesses. Mai likely comes from Maia, a goddess tied to growth and the earth, fitting for a month associated with new plant growth in the northern hemisphere. Juin is usually linked to Juno, queen of the Roman gods and patroness of marriage, though some historians argue the two names actually come from archaic Latin words for elders and juniors rather than the goddesses themselves. Either explanation is accepted by different sources, and no single version has been proven beyond doubt.
Avril is the real outlier. Nobody is fully certain where it comes from. The leading theory ties it to the Latin verb aperire, meaning to open, since April falls when buds and flowers open across the Mediterranean. Other historians trace it to Apru, an Etruscan name connected to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Both ideas are plausible, and French speakers have simply inherited the uncertainty along with the word itself.
Juillet and août are the only two months in French named after real historical people rather than gods, and both used to have far duller names. Juillet was originally Quintilis, Latin for fifth month, back when the Roman calendar started in March. After Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, the Roman Senate renamed Quintilis in his honour because it was his birth month, permanently fixing his name onto the middle of the year.
Août followed the same pattern a generation later. It was originally Sextilis, meaning sixth month, until the Senate renamed it in 8 BC to honour the emperor Augustus, Caesar's adopted heir. The circumflex accent in the modern French spelling, a-o-û-t, is a leftover trace of an older s that used to sit in that spot, part of a broader French spelling habit of marking a dropped letter with an accent rather than deleting it without a trace.
Other Roman rulers wanted the same treatment and did not get it, at least not permanently. The emperor Commodus briefly renamed every single month after one of his own titles in the late second century, according to several ancient historians, but the renaming was undone almost immediately after his death. Julius Caesar and Augustus remain the only two men whose names stuck on the calendar for good, which is exactly why juillet and août look so different from the ten purely descriptive or mythological names around them.
Screenshot from the Noun Town Steam store page, showing the open 3D world
Septembre, octobre, novembre and décembre are the most literal names on the entire calendar. They come straight from the Latin words septem, octo, novem and decem, meaning seven, eight, nine and ten. That only makes sense once you know that the earliest Roman calendar, traditionally credited to Romulus, had just ten months and began the year in march rather than january. Under that original system, septembre genuinely was the seventh month, counted correctly.
The mismatch appeared later, when January and February were added to the front of the calendar, likely under the king Numa Pompilius around the seventh century BC. Suddenly every month after february shifted two places later in the year, so septembre became the ninth month while still carrying a name that means seventh. Nobody bothered to rename the back four months to match their new position, so the French names, like their English, Spanish and Italian equivalents, have carried this small built-in contradiction for roughly 2,700 years.
This is genuinely one of the most common questions learners ask once they notice it, and it is worth knowing it is not a French-specific oddity. English has exactly the same mismatch for the exact same historical reason, so understanding it here also explains why September, October, November and December look the way they do in English.
All twelve French months are masculine nouns and, unlike English, they are never capitalised in ordinary writing. To say something happens in a given month, French uses en followed directly by the month name, such as en janvier for in January, or the slightly more formal au mois de janvier, meaning in the month of January. Both forms are correct and you will hear each one regularly.
Dates work differently from English too. French states the day before the month with no equivalent of the English "of," so 3 March becomes le 3 mars, not le troisieme de mars. The only exception is the first of the month, which uses the ordinal premier instead of a plain number: le premier janvier for the first of January, rather than le un janvier.
These exact phrases turn up constantly on French forms, invoices, train tickets and appointment confirmations, so getting comfortable with the en and au mois de patterns early pays off well beyond just naming the months correctly in a list.
Plain repetition works for some learners, but the French months stick far better once you anchor them to what they actually mean rather than treating all twelve as unrelated syllables. Knowing that mars is the war god and janvier is the god of doorways gives the first three months a story, and that story tends to outlast a flashcard glanced at once and forgotten.
However you choose to practise, the twelve months are exactly the kind of small, high-frequency vocabulary that is worth getting right early, since you will use them constantly in dates, plans and everyday conversation. Games built around spatial, context-based vocabulary learning tend to help here too, since hearing en août attached to an actual scene in a 3D world gives the phrase somewhere real to live in memory, rather than just another line on a list.
Want to see French words like these learned in context rather than on a flashcard?
Try Noun Town on SteamThe twelve months of the year in French are janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre and décembre. Nine of these come directly from Latin, four honour Roman gods, two were renamed after Roman rulers, and four are simply old Latin numbers.
January is janvier in French, from the Latin Ianuarius, named after Janus, the Roman god of doors, beginnings and transitions, which makes it a fitting name for the first month of the year.
Aout (written as août) comes from the Latin Augustus. The month was originally called Sextilis, meaning sixth month, until the Roman Senate renamed it in 8 BC to honour the emperor Augustus, the same way July had already been renamed for Julius Caesar.
No. Unlike English, French does not capitalize the names of months unless they begin a sentence. Janvier, février and the rest are written in lowercase in normal use.
They come from the Latin words for seven, eight, nine and ten because the earliest Roman calendar had only ten months and started in March, making September genuinely the seventh month. When January and February were added to the start of the year, the numbering stopped matching the names, but the old names stuck anyway.
Mars comes from Martius, named after Mars, the Roman god of war. March was actually the first month of the oldest Roman calendar, which makes sense for a culture that resumed military campaigns once winter ended.
Use en followed by the month, such as en janvier for in January, or the slightly more formal au mois de janvier, meaning in the month of January. Both are correct and widely used.
All twelve months in French are masculine nouns. You would say le mois de janvier est froid, meaning the month of January is cold, using le rather than la.
Most learners can recall all twelve French month names reliably within a week or two of short daily practice, particularly with spaced repetition. Building a broader conversational base generally takes several hundred hours according to CEFR-aligned course estimates.
Yes. Noun Town teaches vocabulary like months and dates inside a 3D world with native speaker audio and spaced repetition, so new words get attached to places and routines rather than sitting on a flat list, which tends to help them stick. The Steam page has a free demo if you want to try it before buying.