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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.

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Facts and words about French weekdays

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.

The 7 days of the week in French

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).

You can also practice how to pronounce the days of the week with this video.

Abbreviations of the French weekdays

Basically, the simple trick is to take the first three letters of the word:

On calendars, it’s also quite common to see just the first letter to represent each day, even for mardi and mercredi.

Sentences with the days of the week in French

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:

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:

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:

No time like today to learn the French days of the week

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.

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Anne-Lise Vassoille

Anne-Lise is a translator and copywriter working for various industries... Settled down in London, she cannot get enough of the exceptional cultural life in the English capital city, starting with theater, be it to see a new West End show or to roll up her sleeves with her amateur drama group. She is also interested in photography, as her Instagram profile shows. She indulges her passion for languages in a translation blog she writes with other linguist friends. Go to her Linkedin page to know more about her background and her professional experience.

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