How The Days Of The Week Got Their Names

April 2024 ยท 2 minute read

While Constantine's switch to the seven-day week was a big shift โ€” one that aided Rome in its transition to Christianity โ€” Rome was actually fairly late to the calendrical party. Discover Magazine reports that Jews, Persians, Greeks, and others had all already adopted a seven-day week, likely as a domino effect from the original influence of the Babylonians.

But Rome, of course, wanted to put its own Roman spin on the seven-day week. So, it named each of the seven days after the seven celestial bodies known to Rome at the time โ€” most of which, in turn, had been named after Roman deities. Per LiveScience, in Sunday-to-Saturday order, Rome's seven days were named Dies Solis ("Sun's Day"), Dies Lunae ("Moon's Day"), Dies Martis ("Mars' Day"), Dies Mercurii ("Mercury's Day"), Dies Jovis ("Jupiter's Day"), Dies Veneris ("Venus' Day"), and Dies Saturni ("Saturn's Day"). Today, most Romance languages still use some variation of these names. If you speak Spanish, for example, you might recognize the similarities.

English, on the other hand, is a Germanic language, so we don't have such obvious roots in Latin. As LiveScience explains, the Germanic peoples of northern Europe did adopt Rome's seven-day week, but renamed each day according to Germanic mythology. (By the way, you're probably more used to hearing Germanic mythology referred to as "Norse mythology." But, as Encyclopedia.com explains, Norse mythology is just a subset of Germanic mythology, albeit the best-known and best-preserved subset.)

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