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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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I've always found it fun how in Germanic (and Romance) languages, we still honor the old gods when it comes to the days of the week. Like wednesday being "Wodan's/Odin's day" and thursday being "Thor's day". I wonder how many devout christians realize this.
I also think the etymology of the German word "Buchstaben" (letter, as in a,b,c) is pretty interesting. It literally means "beech rod" and goes back all the way to Germanic tribespeople carving runes into rods made from beechwood.
English names of days are weird. You have the day of the sun and the moon, ok. Fine. Then Tuesday - Friday are norse gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya), but what's Saturday doing there?! Saturn is a completely different pantheon!
In Czech we have it simple - Monday is "after Sunday", then there's Secondday, Middleday, Fourthday, Fifthday, Sabbath and Not-working-day.
The Japanese do it cooler. They've got sun, moon, and their classical elements. This can be a fun little rabbit hole when trying to understand machine translated business documents
It's funny how I was learning Brazilian Portuguese and the days of the week are like Sábado (Saturday), Domingo (Sunday), but then everything starts becoming "days of the fair", segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira...
And I, an English speaker, have the gall to still find this confusing when it comes to intuitively using non-weekends.
Like "BuT wHiCh DaY iS tHoR's DaY?!" Asks the Californian who's never been a Norseman to their knowledge 😂
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like "Hmm, there's not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays"
That might be fully untrue though. 😅
Interesting! I thought it came from "book" somehow, but that doesn't really hold up when I think about it.
Same in Swedish, "bokstav". Beech staff. Funny enough, bok also means book. Maybe the etymology for book comes from that. Or vice versa.
I'm pretty sure book comes from the French world bouc, which refers to goat skin, which was used to make books in the Middle Ages
Interesting. Maybe it's still related somehow if two different things were used to make the same item they somehow were named the same thing.
The days thing also works for Romance languages.
Lunedì = dì della Luna = Moon day
Martedì = dì di Marte = Mars day
etc.
Wait what? Buchstaben = Buchenstab? Never knew that one.
Though in German itself, Wodenstag got replaced with Mittwoch (lit. Midweek) over a millennia ago.
Freya's lucky number was 13.
Christian missionaries trying to convert the Norse heathens spread the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky to turn people from the old ways