The Ultimate Guide to Spanish Days of the Week

Know what seven of the most useful Spanish words you can learn are? The Spanish days of the week!

Learning how to say the days of the week in Spanish is an important step towards having a functional vocabulary.

In this post, you’ll learn the seven days of the week in Spanish, how to use them correctly in sentences, vocabulary to help you talk about the days and more.

Let’s get started.

Contents

• How to Say the Spanish Days of the Week
• • Lunes — Monday
  • Martes — Tuesday
  • Miércoles — Wednesday
  • Jueves — Thursday
  • Viernes — Friday
  • Sábado — Saturday
  • Domingo — Sunday
• How to Use the Spanish Days of the Week
• • 1. Days of the week are not capitalized
  • 2. All days of the week are masculine
  • 3. “On [day]” doesn’t translate directly into Spanish
  • 4. Only sábado and domingo change in plural form
  • 5. Use ser with days of the week 
• Useful Vocabulary for Talking About the Days of the Week
• Tips for Practicing the Spanish Days of the Week

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

How to Say the Spanish Days of the Week

• Lunes — Monday

• Martes — Tuesday

• Miércoles — Wednesday

• Jueves — Thursday

• Viernes — Friday

• Sábado — Saturday

• Domingo — Sunday

Now that you know what the days of the week are, have you ever wondered why they have the names they have?

Most of them were named according to their original Greek/Roman name, originating from spiritual figures. You’ll see some Latin and Hebrew linguistic elements too:

• Lunes: Luna (the moon)
• Martes: Marte (Roman god of war)
• Miércoles: Mercurio (Roman god of commerce)
• Jueves: Júpiter (Roman god of the sky)
• Viernes: Venus (Roman goddess of love)
• Sábado: sabat (Hebrew word for “rest”)
• Domingo: Dominus (Latin word for “Lord”)

How to Use the Spanish Days of the Week

1. Days of the week are not capitalized

In English, failing to capitalize the days of the week is a grammar error. But in Spanish, the opposite is true—capitalizing is grammatically incorrect. The only exception is if they appear as the first word of a sentence.

2. All days of the week are masculine

In Spanish, all nouns have a gender (if you want a full post on Spanish gender, click here). This means the days of the week are gendered too, since they’re nouns. Luckily, this is easy to remember because all days are masculine. This means that when referring to a day, you must use the masculine articles el, los, un and algunos.

3. “On [day]” doesn’t translate directly into Spanish

In English, we use the preposition “on” to talk about something happening on a specific day. Resist the urge to translate directly—in Spanish, you don’t need to insert the word en, or any other preposition, for that matter! When talking about days of the week, use the pronouns el and los to mean “on.” Use el when talking about one single occurrence and the plural los when talking about something that happens habitually.

Viene a Madrid el lunes.
(She’s coming to Madrid on Monday.)

Trabaja todos los sábados.
(He works every Saturday.)

4. Only sábado and domingo change in plural form

Sometimes, you need to talk about days of the week in the plural, like in the previous example (“todos los sábados”).

When making days of the week plural, only add an –s if the word doesn’t already end in –s (in other words, only add -s to sábado and domingo). Otherwise, the word stays the same in the plural form. So, the plural forms of the days are:

• Los lunes
• Los martes 
• Los miércoles 
• Los jueves
• Los viernes 
• Los sábados
• Los domingos 

5. Use ser with days of the week 

When talking about which day of the week it is, you’ll always use ser instead of estar. This might be confusing at first since estar is usually used when describing things that are transient, but with practice, you’ll get the hang of it. Take a look at some examples:

Hoy es martes. (Today is Tuesday.)

El juego es el miércoles. (The game is on Wednesday.)

Mi cumpleaños es el próximo viernes. (My birthday is next Friday.)

Useful Vocabulary for Talking About the Days of the Week

Now that you know the basics, here are some useful words and phrases you may want to use when discussing the week’s days.

Tips for Practicing the Spanish Days of the Week

• Write the full date every day. Writing the full date daily will help you remember the words and their correct order.
• Use authentic media to learn. One of the best ways to learn Spanish is through immersion—that is, by exposing yourself to as much authentic Spanish as you can. FluentU, for example, is an immersion program with thousands of authentic Spanish videos that use interactive subtitles to teach you words and grammar in context.
• Make up an acronym. Use the first letter of each day and create your own acronym to help you remember them. For example, Little Mice Make Jolly Vikings Slam Doors. Yes, it’s silly, but that’s what makes it so memorable.
• Switch your phone to Spanish. Changing your settings to make your phone speak to you in Spanish can be a great way to practice your language skills throughout the day passively.
• Learn with a song. YouTube is chock-full of “days of the week” songs in Spanish. Here’s one, and here’s another for your listening pleasure.

Congratulations! You now have all the tools you need to talk about the Spanish days of the week.

You’ll be well on your way to having Spanish conversations in no time.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)