The Days of the Week in Spanish 🗓️

Basic Vocabulary

There’s probably no person on Earth who, regardless of the language they speak, doesn’t hate Mondays. In order to express such a feeling in Spanish, let’s go over the name of the days of the week:

• Lunes (Monday)
• Martes (Tuesday)
• Miércoles (Wednesday)
• Jueves (Thursday)
• Viernes (Friday)
• Sábado (Saturday)
• Domingo (Sunday)

Singular and Plural

In Spanish, business or working days are not pluralized. Instead, Spanish speakers use an article to tell whether it’s singular or plural. So, “Mondays” translates into “los lunes“, but if it’s a single Monday you are talking about you could see “el lunes” or “un lunes” (depending on how specific you want to be – more on that later).

By contrast, Saturdays and Sundays, which comprise el fin de semana (the weekend), may be pluralized by adding an [s] at the end of the word.

Por ejemplo (for example): sábados (Saturdays) and domingos (Sundays).

It’s easy, isn’t it?

Capitalization

Unlike English, the names of the days of the week in Spanish should never be capitalized, unless they appear at the beginning of a sentence.

Additionally, you should know that all days of the week are masculine. This means that the article appearing next to them should be either:

• An indefinite article: un martes (a Tuesday) or unos martes (some Tuesdays)
• A definite article: el martes (the Tuesday) or los martes (the Tuesdays)

Weeks and Weekends

We already spoke about los días hábiles (working or business days), that is, lunes (Monday), martes (Tuesday), miércoles (Wednesday), jueves (Thursday), and viernes (Friday).

Weekends are comprised of sábados y domingos (Saturdays and Sundays). Although Spanish speakers usually say fin de semana, which is an exact translation of “weekend”, in a more colloquial way, they say “finde”, as one word, instead of “fin de semana” (weekend). 

How to remember their names

Do you know the names of the planets? In Spanish, days are named after them (except for lunes, which is inspired in the name of the moon: “Luna“, which not a planet, but a satellite).

Thinking of the names of the planets is a great way to remember the names of the days:

• lunes (Monday) comes from Luna (The Moon)
• martes (Tuesday) comes from Marte (Mars)
• miércoles (Wednesday) comes from Mercurio (Mercury)
• jueves (Thursday) comes from Júpiter (Jupiter)
• viernes (Friday) comes from Venus (Venus)