Monday is the first day of the week. The day that we start with our jobs and the day that nobody wants to arrive.
As much as we hate Monday, there are a lot of things that we love about that day. So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about this day!
- Monday is the day of the week between Sunday and Tuesday
- According to the international standard ISO 8601 it is the first day of the week
- In countries that adopt the “Sunday-first” convention, it is the second day of the week
- The name of Monday is derived from Old English Mōnandæg and Middle English Monenday
- Originally a translation of Latin dies lunae “day of the Moon”
- The names of the day of the week were coined in the Roman era, in Greek and Latin
- Many languages use terms either directly derived from these names, or loan-translations based on them
- The English noun Monday derived sometime before 1200 from monedæi
- Which itself developed from Old English (around 1000) mōnandæg and mōndæg (literally meaning “moon’s day”)
- Which has cognates in other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian mōnadeig, Middle Low German and Middle Dutch mānendag, mānendach (modern Dutch Maandag), Old High German mānetag (modern German Montag), and Old Norse mánadagr (Swedish and Norwegian nynorsk måndag, Icelandic mánudagur, Danish and Norwegian bokmål mandag)
- The Germanic term is a Germanic interpretation of Latin lunae dies (“day of the moon”)
- Japanese and Korean share the same ancient Chinese words ‘月曜日’ (Hiragana:げつようび, translit. getsuyо̄bi, Hangul:월요일) for Monday which means “day of the moon”
- In many Indo-Aryan languages, the word for Monday is Somavāra or Chandravāra, Sanskrit loan-translations of “Monday”
- In some cases, the “ecclesiastical” names are used
- A tradition of numbering the days of the week in order to avoid the “pagan” connotation of the planetary names
- In which Monday is the “second day” (Greek Δευτέρα ἡμέρα, Latin feria secunda)
- In many Slavic languages the name of the day translates to “after Sunday/holiday”
- Russian понедельник (ponyedyelnik), Croatian ponedjeljak, Serbian понедељак (ponedeljak), Ukrainian понеділок (ponedilok), Bulgarian понеделник (ponedelnik), Polish poniedziałek, Czech pondělí, Slovak pondelok, Slovenian ponedeljek
- In Turkish it is called pazartesi, which also means “after Sunday”
- Historically, the Greco-Roman week began with Sunday (dies solis), and Monday (dies lunae) was the second day of the week
- It is still the custom to refer to Monday as feria secunda in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church
- Quakers also traditionally referred to Monday as “Second Day”
- The Portuguese and the Greek (Eastern Orthodox Church) also retain the ecclesiastical tradition (Portuguese segunda-feira, Greek Δευτέρα “devtéra” “second”)
- Likewise the Modern Hebrew name for Monday is yom-sheni
- In modern times, it has become more common to consider Monday the first day of the week
- The international ISO 8601 standard places Monday as the first day of the week
- And this is widely used on calendars in Europe and in international business
- Monday is xīngqīyī in Chinese, meaning “day one of the week”
- Modern Western culture usually looks at Monday as the beginning of the workweek
- A number of popular songs in Western culture feature Monday, often as a day of depression, anxiety, avolition, hysteria, or melancholy
- Mostly because of its association with the first day of the work week
- For example, “Monday, Monday” (1966) from the Mamas & the Papas, “Rainy Days and Mondays” (1971) from the Carpenters, “I Don’t Like Mondays” (1979) from the Boomtown Rats, Monday, Monday, Monday (2002) from Tegan and Sara, and “Manic Monday” (1986) from the Bangles (written by Prince)
- There is a band named the Happy Mondays
- And an American pop punk band Hey Monday
- The popular comic strip character Garfield by Jim Davis is well known for his disdain for Mondays
- In the United Kingdom, more people commit suicide in England and Wales on Mondays than other days of the week
- More people in the country in general call in sick
- And more people worldwide surf the web
- During July 2002, the consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting briefly announced that it would rename itself to Monday
- And spend $110 million over the next year to establish that brand before it later reversed that decision
