32. Why Is Tuesday Called Tuesday?

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 32.

Why Is Tuesday Called Tuesday?

Why is Tuesday called Tuesday, and why does September mean "seven"?

Every week we say the names of ancient gods without knowing it. And every autumn we say "September", even though the word originally meant the seventh month. Our calendars are a strange museum of Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions – and of old decisions that nobody ever corrected.

Seven days, seven heavenly bodies

Imagine that the days of the week were called "Mars Day", "Mercury Day" or "Venus Day". For the ancient Romans that would have been nothing unusual. Their seven-day week linked the days with the Sun, the Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye. And because the planets bore the names of gods, so did the days.

When this way of naming spread among the Germanic peoples, it was not a simple copy of Latin. Some of the Roman gods were replaced by Germanic gods who resembled them. Linguists call this interpretatio germanica: the Roman name was translated into the local mythology.

That is why Tuesday is related to the name Tyr, Wednesday hides Woden and in the word Thursday we can hear Thunor, the Germanic god of thunder. Friday is usually linked with the goddess Frige, related to the Norse Frigg. Freyja is often mentioned too, but the exact mythological relationships are not completely simple.

Why didn't Saturday get a Germanic god?

Of the whole week, English kept one strikingly Roman name: Saturday is Saturn's day. In contrast, French samedi and Spanish sábado developed from a tradition connected with the Sabbath. So language history does not just mean renaming: sometimes older names survive, while neighbouring languages take a different path.

Compare Tuesday and French mardi: the English name refers to Tiw, the French one to the Roman Mars. Yet historically both continue the same model of "the day of the god of war". That is the magic of etymology – words can look completely different and still share a story.

Did you know? — In German, Wednesday is *Mittwoch*, literally "the middle of the week". Where English kept Woden, German chose a different name.

Why does September have a seven in its name?

If you have ever studied Latin numbers, it may have occurred to you that September is related to septem (seven), October to octo (eight), November to novem (nine) and December to decem (ten). But today they are the ninth to twelfth months. What went wrong?

According to the traditional account of the early Roman calendar, the year began in March. So Martius came first, September was the seventh month and December the tenth. But ancient reports about the oldest calendar also contain legends; we cannot reconstruct every detail of the supposed original "ten-month" year with certainty. What matters for our topic is that in some periods the Roman calendar had March as its starting point.

Later, January and February got their fixed places, and 1 January became the start of the civil year. The older number names in the autumn, however, stayed. Like many irregular English words, they survived a big change in the system, but nobody rewrote the old names.

Twelve months – twelve little stories

April is especially interesting. A popular explanation links it with Latin aperire – "to open", because flowers open in spring. But there are other hypotheses too, for example a connection with Aphrodite. We have no certain answer; this kind of uncertainty is a normal part of linguistics.

July and August carry the names of Roman statesmen. The earlier Quintilis was renamed in honour of Julius Caesar, and Sextilis in honour of Augustus. But that does not mean Caesar and Augustus "added two months to the calendar". Both July and August existed long before they were renamed.

Did Augustus steal a day from February?

You may have heard the story that Augustus wanted a month as long as Julius Caesar's, so he stole a day from February. It is a nice story, but it does not stand up historically. We know the lengths of the Roman months from older calendar evidence too, and the commonly repeated explanation is a later legend.

February has its unusual length because it is the heir of a complicated development of the Roman calendar and its leap-year rules. Julius Caesar reformed the calendar in the 1st century BC; much later, in 1582, the Gregorian calendar was created, which was matched more precisely to the solar year. But the names of the months stayed more or less the same.

The same day, a different language: a small European experiment

Try putting several languages side by side. English Thursday and German Donnerstag point to thunder; French jeudi, on the other hand, keeps Jupiter's name. Today's words look different, but they all come from the same Roman day dedicated to Jupiter, whose Germanic counterpart was the god of thunder.

In the same way, English Friday, German Freitag and French vendredi stand side by side. The first two names recall the Germanic goddess Frige, the third the Roman Venus. A comparison like this is a simple way to discover ancient cultural contacts without knowing Latin or Old English.

And one more detail from everyday life: in the international standard ISO 8601 the week starts on Monday, while many American calendars show Sunday as the first day. This is no longer about etymology, but about a modern convention. The old names stay, while the habits of using them change.

When the months had completely different names

The Roman names are not the only ones that have ever been used in English. The early medieval scholar Bede also described Old English names for the months. We find, for example, Ēosturmōnaþ for the period corresponding to April, or Hāligmōnaþ, "holy month", for September. Some names were connected with the farming year, festivals or the weather. So today's April and September are not simply the result of how Old English developed: the Latin calendar tradition won.

In this respect Czech differs from English in an interesting way. Duben and květen (April and May) still recall nature and the seasons (dub = oak, květ = flower), while April and May carry a Latin cultural heritage. So each language keeps a different slice of the past in its calendar.

Conclusion: a calendar that remembers the past

The fascinating thing about the calendar is that we use it every day but almost never realize how much history we have just said out loud. Tuesday is a small greeting to a Germanic god of war. Saturday has outlived the Roman Saturn. And December still thinks it is the tenth month. Our language is sometimes much older than the things we name with it.