The names of the days of the week are a motley crew – they come from lots of different religions and mythologies. Here’s a whistlestop tour of where they got their names. Except for the ‘day’ bit, obviously.

Sunday

It’ll probably come as no surprise to you to learn that Sunday is named after the Sun. This comes from the Old English word ‘Sunndæg’ which means, you’ve guessed it, ‘Sun’s day’. Why the Sun? Well, lots of cultures associated it with gods and deities, and as the first day of the week, Sunday was traditionally a day of worship.

This was all started by the Babylonians who played a key role in developing the seven-day week. They were skilled astronomers and carefully observed how celestial bodies moved. The Sun was particularly important to them, so they named the first day of the week after it.

The Romans would later nick lots of bits of Babylonian culture, and one of these was the tradition of naming days of the week after celestial bodies and gods. They referred to the first day of the week as ‘dies Solis’, meaning ‘day of the Sun’, which later made its way into various Romance languages, as well as our own Germanic one.

Monday

Probably the most hated of all the days, Monday comes from the Old English word ‘Monandæg’, which means ‘Moon's day’. It’s also associated with the Moon in lots of Romance languages too: Lunes in Spanish, Lundi in French and Lunedì in Italian all have ‘lunar’ origins.

This is also thanks to the Babylonians, and their love of the celestial bodies, which was again stolen by the Romans – their Monday was called ‘dies Lunae’ or ‘day of the moon’.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

I’ve lumped these ones together because they take us away from the Babylonians and Romans, and over to what we now call Scandinavia. You might want to put a coat on.

Tuesday is named after the Norse god Tyr, coming from the Old English word ‘Tiwesdæg’, which means' ‘Tiw’s (or Tyr’s) day’. Tyr was the god of law and justice in Norse mythology.
Wednesday is named after the Norse god Odin, from the Old English word ‘Wodnesdæg’, meaning ‘Woden’s (or Odin’s) day’. Odin was the top dog/god in Norse mythology, and was associated with knowledge and wisdom. Much like his Greek counterpart, Zeus, he also put it about a bit (see Thursday).
Thursday is named after Chris Hemsworth, AKA the Norse god Thor, and comes from the Old English word ‘Þūnresdæg’ (a prize to anyone who can tell me how to pronounce that), meaning, of course, ‘Thor's day’. Thor was the god of thunder, and son of Odin and a giantess named Jörð – that conception must have been interesting. Odin obviously had a bit of a thing for ladies of the larger persuasion as he had two other children with two other giantesses too.
Friday is named after the Norse goddess Frigg or Freyja, and comes from the Old English word ‘Frigedæg’, meaning (you’ve probably worked out the pattern by now) ‘Frigg’s (or Freyja’s) day’. Frigg was married to Odin, which must have been tough when he was shagging all those giants.

Saturday

For Saturday, we’re heading back over the Mediterranean to the Romans. It’s named after the planet Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture and time (via the Old English word ‘Sæternesdæg’, meaning… well, you can probably guess that one). Saturday was traditionally a day for farming and shopping-type stuff, which is why it was named after this particular god.

So there you have it – seven days of the week, done. Not as fun as Craig David’s, but you can’t have everything.

We all know the alphabet, right? WRONG.

(Well, not completely wrong, but ‘ONLY A BIT WRONG’ didn’t work as well dramatically.)

I was watching Only Connect the other day (the hardest quiz on TV™ – if I get one question right I do a little dance and feel like I’m winning at life), and one of the questions was about letters of the alphabet which we don’t use anymore. After an obligatory not-at-all in-depth internet search I discovered there are at least 12 letters which didn’t make it through the audition stages of the competition. 12, I hear you splutter? I can’t handle the excitement! Don’t fret, I’m only going to tell you about six now – I’ll save the rest for a later blog post (I wouldn’t want to spoil you).

So, in no particular order, here we go...

1. Thorn

You know when you see a sign that says ‘Ye olde something shoppe’? That ‘y’ at the start of ‘Ye’ actually isn’t a ‘y’ – it’s a whole other letter which means we should be pronouncing ‘ye’ as... ‘the’. Okay, so that’s not terribly exciting, but in days of yore (or should that be thore? No, no it shouldn’t), there was a single letter for the ‘th’ sound called thorn. Here’s what it looks like:

þ

So, what happened to the thorn? Turns out it’s those pesky printers’ fault. When the printing press made its way to our shores from Europe, it didn’t have a thorn, as no one else used it. So some bright spark decided that the closest thing to it was a ‘y’ (really? Not a ‘p’?). And that’s where we get ‘Ye’ from.

Thorn itself was an Anglo Saxon rune from the Elder Futhark runic alphabet which looks pretty awesome and I wish we still used today. And thorn is actually spelled þorn (hee hee hee).

2. Ampersand

Yep, you did read that right. The ampersand (&) was originally a proud member of the alphabet (in fact, it was the last letter of the alphabet), and was only downgraded in the 19th century. Don’t believe me? Here it is in all its glory in an 1863 book called The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks (you can see the whole of that book here).

Interesting (kinda) fact: it wasn’t always called an ampersand. When people were reciting the alphabet, they’d say ‘X, Y, Z, and’, which sounds a bit stupid. So, some very clever person decided to say ‘and per se’ instead, which basically means ‘by itself’ (I bet that person got punched in the face a lot). Eventually the three words were run together, and we ended up with ‘ampersand’.

I love ampersands (except when people use them instead of ‘and’ for no reason). This is a picture of a shelf in my house which demonstrates just how much:

3. Ash

We do still use this one today. Although when I say ‘we’ I mean pretty much no one. Here it is:

Æ

This is a ligature, which is a posh way of saying it’s two letters smushed together. Like thorn, ash comes from the Futhark alphabet. It managed to survive the Norman conquest and was around until the 13th century before it fell by the wayside. It did stage a comeback in the 16th century when writers started to borrow from Latin and Greek for words we didn’t have at the time, but you’re unlikely to see it anywhere in English these days. It does still appear in the alphabets of some languages though, including Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.

Here’s a list of some everyday words which used to contain ash:

archæology
curriculum vitæ
fæces (because I have to get something poo-related in every blog post I write)
hæmorrhage
pædiatrician
vertebræ.

There’s loads more here.

4. The long S

You’ve definitely seen this one. It’s basically what it says on the tin – that long ‘s’ that everyone thinks is an ‘f’. Here it is in a book only to be sold by Spiderman:

Confusingly, the long s wasn’t superseded by the ‘s’ we use today – they were both in action at the same time. Madness. I won’t even try to explain this lexical anomaly because thankfully another blogger has already done that for me. Find out about that here.

5. Yogh

In a weird coincidence, I was having a chat with my sister’s partner over the weekend, and he informed me that the shop John Menzies* should actually have been pronounced John ‘Mingis’ (I can’t remember why we were talking about John Menzies – conversational gold, I’m sure). It turns out that the reason for this is the old English and Scots letter yogh. Here it is, looking suspiciously like a 3:

ȝ

Yogh actually had three (!) different pronunciations, depending on whereabouts in the word it appeared. So in modern English it could either be spoken as a ‘y’ as in ‘yes’ or a ‘g’ as in ‘night’, while in Scotland it would be the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’.

So, what happened to yogh? Once again, it’s the fault of the printing press. In English-English it was rendered in print as a ‘y’, while in Scottish-English it was replaced with a ‘z’. Hence the FUBAR John Menzies pronunciation**.

I’m concerned about what this means for how I say the word ‘yoghurt’.

6. Eth

Here’s an eth for you:

ð

Eth comes from Irish, and originally represented a slightly different pronunciation of ‘th’. It was essentially a softer version of thorn (depending on your regional accent) – so more like ‘thing’ than ‘them’. (The first is the voiceless dental fricative, while the second is the voiced dental fricative. Well, OBVS.)

It was thorn that killed off eth – people just started using thorn all the time, so eth didn’t have a job anymore. So it eth-ed off.

I’ve said it (many times) before and I’ll say it again – the English language is an ever-changing beast. And that’s a great thing. Who knows what kind of alphabet kids will be singing in a few hundred years’ time (assuming the impending apocalypse hasn’t happened of course). I have a suspicion it may well be emoji based...

* For any young people reading, John Menzies was a WH Smith-type shop that was around in the 90s. I used to frequent the café when I was a student because it was the only one in Colchester you could smoke in. Ah, memories.

** This also applies to Menzies ‘Ming’ Campbell and Dalziel in Dalziel and Pascoe (which should be pronounced Dee-ell). Unfortunately it does not explain why Mainwaring is pronounced Mannering.

Days of our lives – how the days got their names