Friday - Etymology

Etymology

The name Friday comes from the Old English Frīġedæġ, meaning the "day of Frigg", a result of an old convention equivocating the Old English goddess Frige with the Roman goddess Venus, with whom the day is associated in many different cultures. The same holds for Frīatag in Old High German, Freitag in Modern German and Vrijdag in Dutch.

The expected cognate name in Old Norse would be *friggjar-dagr. However, the name of Friday in Old Norse is frjá-dagr instead, indicating a loan of the weekday names from Low German. The modern Scandinavian form is Fredag in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, meaning Freja's day. The distinction between Freja and Frigg in some Germanic mythologies is problematic.

The word for Friday in most Romance languages is derived from Latin dies Veneris or "day of Venus" (a translation of Greek Aphrodites hemera) such as vendredi in French, venerdì in Italian, viernes in Spanish, divendres in Catalan, vennari in Corsican, and vineri in Romanian. This is also reflected in the p-Celtic Welsh language as dydd Gwener. An exception is Portuguese, also a Romance language, which uses the word sexta-feira, meaning "sixth day of liturgical celebration", derived from the Latin "feria sexta" used in religious texts where it was not allowed to consecrate days to pagan gods.

In Greek, four of the words for the weekdays derived from ordinals. However, the Greek word for Friday is Paraskevi (Παρασκευή) and is derived from a word meaning "to prepare" (παρασκευάζω). Like Saturday (Savato, Σάββατο) and Sunday, (Kiriaki, Κυριακή), Friday is named for its liturgical significance, as the day of preparation before Sabbath, which was inherited by Greek Christian Orthodox culture from Jewish practices.

Most Slavic languages call Friday the "fifth (day)": Belarusian пятніца – pyatnitsa, Bulgarian петък – petŭk, Czech pátek, Polish piątek, Russian пятница – pyatnitsa, Serbian петак – petak, Croatian petak, Slovene petek, Slovak piatok, and Ukrainian п'ятниця – p'yatnitsya. The Hungarian word péntek is Hungarian original.

In most of the varieties of Arabic, Friday is Jum'a-tul-Mubarak (or a derived variation of Jum'a), named for Jum'a.

In most of the Indian languages, Friday is Shukravar (or a derived variation of Sukravar), named for Shukra, the Sanskrit name of the planet Venus.

In Japanese, 金曜日 (きんようび, kinyōbi?) is formed from the words 金星 (きんせい, kinsei?) meaning Venus (lit. gold + planet) and 曜日 (ようび, yōbi?) meaning day (of the week).

In the Korean language, it is also 金曜日 (Hangul: 금요일, Romanization: geumyoil), formed from "gold" + "day" from Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters).