Days of the Week in Arabic

The Arabic days of the week are mostly numbers. الأحد (al-aḥad) is Sunday and means "the one", and the count runs through الخميس (al-khamīs), "the fifth", for Thursday. Only two days break the pattern: Friday is الجمعة (al-jumuʿa), the gathering, and Saturday is السبت (al-sabt), the rest.

Almost every list of these words online gives you Modern Standard Arabic and stops. That is the version nobody says out loud. The table below gives all seven days in Modern Standard plus the four spoken varieties you are most likely to meet, so you can read a Syrian calendar and understand a Cairo taxi driver.

The 7 days of the week in Arabic, in five varieties

In Modern Standard Arabic the seven are al-aḥad, al-ithnayn, al-thulāthāʾ, al-arbiʿāʾ, al-khamīs, al-jumuʿa and al-sabt. The spoken forms differ from those by enough to matter. Cairo says التلات (it-talāt) for Tuesday, Damascus says التلاتا (it-talāta), and a textbook teaches you neither one.

How to read these tables

Each cell shows the Arabic script first and the transliteration under it, and one scheme is used across the whole page. Long vowels carry a macron (ā, ī, ū). The emphatic consonants carry a dot (ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, ḥ). The symbol ʿ is the letter ayn and ʾ is hamza. The vowels ē and ō appear only in the dialect columns, because Modern Standard Arabic does not have them: the Standard اثنين ithnayn becomes tnēn in Damascus and itnēn in Cairo.

The Arabic is unvocalized, the way it appears on a calendar or a shop sign. The article ال (al-) belongs to every day name and assimilates to the letter after it in speech, which is why the transliterations read is-sabt and it-tnēn.

The word for day is يوم (yawm). Put it in front of a day name and you get both "Monday" and "on Monday": يوم الاثنين (yawm al-ithnayn). No preposition is needed. Morocco uses a different word for day in this slot, نهار (nhār), so Monday there is nhar t-tnin.

Why the Arabic days are numbers, and why Friday and Saturday are not

Five of the seven Arabic day names are ordinal numbers counted from Sunday. الأحد (al-aḥad) is built on واحد (wāḥid, one), الاثنين (al-ithnayn) on اثنان (ithnān, two), الثلاثاء (al-thulāthāʾ) on ثلاثة (thalātha, three), الأربعاء (al-arbiʿāʾ) on أربعة (arbaʿa, four), and الخميس (al-khamīs) on خمسة (khamsa, five). If you already know Arabic numbers 1 to 100, you know five sevenths of this vocabulary already and nobody told you.

The count stops at five. Friday is الجمعة (al-jumuʿa) from the root جمع (j-m-ʿ, to gather), for the congregational prayer صلاة الجمعة (ṣalāt al-jumuʿa). The name is Islamic and it replaced an older one: in pre-Islamic Arabia the day was العروبة (al-ʿarūba). Saturday is السبت (al-sabt), from a Semitic root meaning to cease or rest, the same word behind Hebrew shabbat and English sabbath. Arabic did not coin it; it inherited it along with the seven-day week itself.

There is no separate Muslim set of weekday names. Muslims call the days what every Arabic speaker calls them. Friday is the only day with a religious name, and Saturday's name is older than either religion that uses it.

Does the Arabic week start on Saturday or Sunday?

The Arabic week starts on Sunday. The names settle it. Al-aḥad means "the one" and al-khamīs means "the fifth", so Sunday through Thursday is days one to five and nothing else fits. You will still find sources that say Saturday, and they are describing the working calendar rather than the vocabulary. Where the week begins in practice is a different question. It depends on the country, and it has moved twice in living memory. The table below gives the official weekend and working week for 17 Arab states.

Two dates explain most of the confusion in older sources. The United Arab Emirates moved its public-sector weekend from Thursday and Friday to Friday and Saturday in September 2006, and Saudi Arabia made the same move by royal decree in June 2013. Before those changes Saturday genuinely was the first working day across the Gulf, which is where the Saturday-first claim came from and why it keeps getting copied. The UAE went further in January 2022, adopting a Saturday and Sunday weekend with a half day on Friday for prayers. It is the only Gulf state to have done so.

Those figures cover the government and banking week. Shops mostly ignore it and close for the Friday prayer instead.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow and next week in Arabic

The relative time words diverge much harder between dialects than the day names do. "Today" is اليوم (al-yawm) in Modern Standard and in the Gulf, but a Cairene says النهارده (in-nahārda), which sounds nothing like it. Learn this table if you are going somewhere rather than reading something.

Two cells in that table are worth stopping on. In Levantine, جمعة (jumʿa) means both Friday and week, so الجمعة الجاية (ij-jumʿa ij-jāye) is "next week" and only context tells you it is not "next Friday". Moroccans borrowed their word for week outright: سيمانة (simāna) comes from Spanish semana, and beats أسبوع (usbūʿ) in Casablanca.

The Standard word for week, أسبوع (usbūʿ), is itself built from سبعة (sabʿa, seven). To say two weeks you do not use the number two at all, because Arabic has a dual: أسبوعين (usbūʿayn) is two weeks, and it works in every variety on this page. Three and up goes back to a number and a plural, ثلاثة أسابيع (thalāthat asābīʿ).

Mistakes learners make with Arabic weekdays

The most expensive mistake is learning only the Modern Standard column. Nobody says al-thulāthāʾ in conversation. They say it-talāta or it-talāt or t-tlat, and a learner who drilled the Standard form hears none of them as the word they studied. We tell learners to memorize the Standard spelling for reading and exactly one dialect column for speaking. Trying to hold all five at once is how people end up recognizing none of them.

Learners also read the shortened dialect forms as errors. Egyptian التلات (it-talāt) and الأربع (il-arbaʿ) look like the Standard words with the ending knocked off, and historically that is roughly what happened. They are the normal forms in Cairo, and using the full ones marks you as a foreigner reading off a card. Our Egyptian Arabic resources and Levantine Arabic resources pages cover the wider vocabulary split between the two.

The letter ج in Friday catches almost everybody. It is j in Standard Arabic and the Levant, hard g in Cairo, and a soft zh in Morocco, so the one written word الجمعة comes out as ij-jumʿa, ig-gumʿa and j-jemʿa. The spelling gives you no warning, so a word you know perfectly well can go straight past you.

The weekend has a trap of its own. The Standard phrase is عطلة نهاية الأسبوع (ʿuṭlat nihāyat al-usbūʿ) and almost nobody says it. In the Gulf and Egypt people borrow the English word straight in: الويكند (il-wīkend).

More Arabic reference tables

Other charts we keep for looking things up rather than reading through:

• The Arabic months, Hijri and Gregorian, including the two competing sets of names for January to December
• Arabic numbers 1 to 100, which is where five of the seven day names come from
• The Arabic colour words and their masculine, feminine and plural forms, laid out by pattern
• The Arabic words for family members, including the four separate words for cousin
• Common Arabic phrases in three dialects, for the sentences you will need first
• Our Arabic vocabulary lists by topic, downloadable as plain files or ready-made Anki decks

Frequently asked questions

What are the 7 days names in Arabic?

In Modern Standard Arabic they are al-ahad (Sunday), al-ithnayn (Monday), al-thulathaa (Tuesday), al-arbiaa (Wednesday), al-khamis (Thursday), al-jumua (Friday) and al-sabt (Saturday). Five of the seven are ordinal numbers counted from Sunday. Friday means the gathering and Saturday means the rest. Spoken forms differ: Cairo says yom it-talat for Tuesday where a Damascene says yom it-talata.

What do Muslims call the days of the week?

The same names everybody else uses in Arabic. There is no separate religious set. The one day with a specifically Islamic name is Friday, al-jumua, the day of gathering, named for the congregational prayer salat al-jumua. Before Islam that day was called al-aruba. The other six names are either ordinal numbers or, in Saturday's case, a Semitic word for rest that Arabic and Hebrew both inherited.

How do you say 2 weeks in Arabic?

Usbuayn. Arabic has a dual number, so two of anything gets its own ending rather than the word for two. The singular is usbu, a week. The dual is usbuan in the subject case and usbuayn everywhere else, and usbuayn is the form you will actually hear in Cairo, Beirut and Riyadh alike. Three weeks and up goes back to a number plus a plural: thalathat asabi.

Does the Arabic week start on Saturday or Sunday?

Sunday, as far as the language is concerned. Al-ahad means the one and al-khamis means the fifth, so the count runs Sunday through Thursday and nothing else is possible. The Saturday claim comes from the working calendar, not the vocabulary: until 2006 in the UAE and 2013 in Saudi Arabia the weekend was Thursday and Friday, which made Saturday the first day back at work. Both countries have since moved.

How do you say on Monday in Arabic?

Yawm al-ithnayn. The word yawm means day, and putting it in front of the day name covers both Monday and on Monday, so no preposition is needed. Moroccans use nhar instead of yawm: nhar t-tnin. If you want to be explicit you can say fi yawm al-ithnayn, but almost nobody does in speech.

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