Days of the Week and Months in Brazilian Portuguese

My first appointment in Brazil was written on a small card: quinta, 10h. At home I found the week on the calendar stuck to my fridge. Its header read D S T Q Q S S, so I circled the square under the first Q and turned up on the day I had circled, a Wednesday. The receptionist was very kind about it. She turned the card over and wrote the week out in blue biro, from domingo to sábado, so I could see that the first Q is quarta and the second is quinta. I still have the card.

The days of the week and months in Brazilian Portuguese look like a ten-minute job. The months are close relatives of the English ones, and five of the seven days are numbers. But the numbering starts where you would not expect it, dates run in their own order, and Brazilians have a few calendar habits worth knowing before you book anything.

The days of the week in Brazilian Portuguese

The table starts on Sunday for a reason. In the Portuguese count, domingo is day one, which makes Monday the second day: segunda. Tuesday is the third (terça), Wednesday the fourth (quarta), Thursday the fifth (quinta) and Friday the sixth (sexta). Once you see that, the names stop looking arbitrary. Brazilian wall calendars usually start the week on Sunday as well.

Nobody says the full names all day. In conversation, -feira tends to fall off: Te vejo na quinta means "See you on Thursday." The full form turns up in writing, on the radio and whenever someone wants to sound precise: A reunião foi remarcada para segunda-feira — "The meeting has been moved to Monday."

Gender is the part that trips learners up. The -feira days are feminine, so you say a segunda, na terça and toda quarta. Sábado and domingo are masculine: o sábado, no domingo, todo sábado. In the plural, both halves of the word change: as segundas-feiras, as sextas-feiras.

Two sound notes. The x in sexta sounds like an s in most of Brazil, but in Rio you will hear something closer to SAYSH-tuh. In segunda and domingo, the vowel before the n is nasal, so let the sound pass through your nose rather than finishing with a full English "n."

On shop doors, timetables and forms, the days shrink to three letters: seg, ter, qua, qui, sex, sáb, dom. Aberto de seg. a sáb. means "Open Monday to Saturday." Wall calendars go further and use one letter each: D S T Q Q S S. That gives you two Qs and three Ss, which is no help at all until you know the order. I learned that one at a reception desk.

Why is Monday "segunda-feira"?

Spanish has lunes, French lundi and Italian lunedì, all versions of "moon day," inherited from the Roman habit of naming days after planets and gods. Among the major Romance languages, only Portuguese dropped those names from Monday to Friday.

The feira in segunda-feira has nothing to do with shopping, even though the modern word feira means a street market, and a feira de sábado is where many Brazilians buy their fruit. It comes from Church Latin feria, a day of religious celebration. In the Church calendar, Monday was feria secunda, Tuesday feria tertia, and so on to Friday.

You will often read that one man invented the system: Martinho de Dume, a sixth-century bishop in Braga, in what is now northern Portugal. The real story is more modest. The numbered names already existed in Church Latin. Martinho's contribution was to push them. In a sermon known as De correctione rusticorum, he scolded Christians who still named their days after Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. A Correio Braziliense explainer covers where the names came from and how they spread.

Saturday and Sunday were never part of the count. Sábado comes from the Sabbath, and domingo from Latin dies Dominicus, "the Lord's day." That is also why Sunday counts as the first day.

The months in Brazilian Portuguese

The months are friendlier. Most are recognisable from English, and all twelve are masculine.

March deserves its note. Brazilians like to joke that o ano só começa depois do Carnaval, "the year only starts after Carnaval," and anyone who has tried to get a reply to a work email in February will tell you the joke is half true. August has a worse reputation. Agosto, mês do desgosto means "August, month of misery," and plenty of people repeat it half-seriously. The rhyme is reason enough for it to survive.

In Brazilian Portuguese, months and weekdays are written in lowercase: janeiro, not Janeiro, and segunda-feira, not Segunda-feira. The rule is in Base XIX of the 1990 spelling agreement, promulgated in Brazil by Decree 6.583, whose own example list is segunda-feira; outubro; primavera. The January you will see with a capital J is Rio de Janeiro, because there it is part of a name. Portugal used to capitalise the months before that agreement, so older books from Portugal still do.

"In January" is em janeiro, with no article: Eu vou viajar em janeiro. Add de and a year when you need it: em março de 2027. The article appears when mês does: no mês que vem (next month), no mês passado (last month).

How to say and write dates in Portuguese

A Brazilian date runs small to large: day, month, year. In speech, the pattern is dia + number + de + month + de + year.

• Hoje é dia 15 de outubro. — "Today is October 15th."
• Meu aniversário é dia 3 de maio. — "My birthday is on May 3rd."
• A festa é no dia 20. — "The party is on the 20th."

Notice that "on" often disappears, and that the day is an ordinary number. Only the first of the month gets an ordinal: primeiro de janeiro, written 1º de janeiro. Every other day is plain: dois de janeiro, quinze de novembro. Saying segundo de maio for May 2nd is a classic beginner slip, and a confusing one, since segunda is also Monday.

Years are read as ordinary numbers, so 2026 is dois mil e vinte e seis. If numbers in the thousands still slow you down, our guide to counting in Brazilian Portuguese has the patterns.

In writing, the format is DD/MM/AAAA, where AAAA stands for ano. So 06/07 is 6 July, not June 7th. If you grew up writing the month first, American style, this is the one to watch. Every form that asks for your data de nascimento (date of birth) expects day-first order, and getting it backwards on a bank form causes more trouble than arriving at an appointment a day early.

What about asking the date? Que dia é hoje? can mean either the date or the weekday, and people answer whichever they think you meant: Hoje é quinta or Hoje é dia 15. If you want the number, the everyday question is Hoje é dia quanto?

You will see dates long before you need to say one, because Brazilian cities name streets and squares after them. São Paulo has Rua 25 de Março and Avenida Nove de Julho. Salvador has Avenida Sete de Setembro. Curitiba's best-known pedestrian street is Rua XV de Novembro, and Rio has Praça XV, both with the day in Roman numerals. In those names, the month takes a capital letter, because the whole thing is a proper noun.

Try this in Falando: The A1 lesson on dates and the calendar drills the date pattern, the 1º exception and the DD/MM order. Its exercises open once you are signed in, so do a round before you fill in your next Brazilian form.

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Talking about the week like a Brazilian

A few phrases do most of the work when you make plans:

• na segunda — "on Monday," meaning one particular Monday. Às segundas or nas segundas means "on Mondays," every week. Fechado às segundas on a restaurant door means you will never get lunch there on a Monday.
• de segunda a sexta — "Monday to Friday," the normal working week.
• fim de semana or final de semana — "the weekend." You will hear both, and final de semana is especially common in Brazil.
• semana que vem and semana passada — "next week" and "last week." The same works with days: sexta que vem, sábado passado. Our lesson on past time expressions has more of these.
• dia útil — a working day. Sooner or later, a bank or an online shop will tell you o prazo é de cinco dias úteis, "it takes five working days."
• dia sim, dia não — "every other day."
• Sextou! — roughly "It's Friday!" Brazilians turned sexta into a verb in the past tense, and the word fills social media and group chats from about Friday lunchtime.

Here is the one that catches almost everybody. Brazilians usually call two weeks quinze dias, fifteen days, and a week from today is often daqui a oito dias, eight days from now. The count includes the day you start on. So Volto daqui a quinze dias means "I'll be back in two weeks," not a precise fifteen. A quinzena is a fortnight, and a primeira quinzena de dezembro is the first half of December.

Public holidays, feriados, bring their own verb. When a holiday lands on a Tuesday or a Thursday, many Brazilians take the day in between off as well, joining the holiday to the weekend. That is emendar o feriado, and the result is a feriadão, a long weekend. The working day caught in the middle is called the dia enforcado, literally "the hanged day," a phrase that sounds far more dramatic than a quiet Friday at home.

Try this in Falando: In Bate-papo, try to arrange a weekend plan. Suggest a day, let your partner push it back (Sábado não dá, que tal domingo?) and settle on a date and a time before you say goodbye.

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People also ask about days and months in Brazilian Portuguese

Why do Portuguese weekdays end in "-feira"?

The ending comes from Church Latin feria, a day of religious celebration, not from the modern word for a market. The Church numbered the days from Sunday, so Monday was the second day, segunda-feira, and Friday the sixth, sexta-feira.

Are days and months capitalised in Portuguese?

No. Under the 1990 spelling agreement, days of the week, months and seasons are written in lowercase: segunda-feira, outubro, primavera. They take a capital only at the start of a sentence or inside a proper name, such as Rua Sete de Setembro.

How do you write the date in Brazil?

Day first, then month, then year: DD/MM/AAAA. In words, it is 15 de outubro de 2026. The first of the month is the only ordinal: 1º de maio.

What does "sextou" mean?

Sextou is slang for "It's Friday!" It turns sexta-feira into a verb, and Brazilians use it to celebrate the end of the working week.

Start with today's date

You do not need all of this by tomorrow. Learn the order first: domingo is one, segunda is two, and the rest follows. Then say today's date out loud, the Brazilian way: Hoje é quinta-feira, 15 de outubro. Do the same tomorrow, and the day after.

Falando's Journaling is a good place to make that a habit. Start each entry with the day and date in Portuguese, and within a week you will have written all seven days and remembered which ones are feminine. Add Sextou! when the week earns it.

And if someone hands you a card that says quinta, look for the second Q. Vamos lá!