Word of the Week – Tuesday

Let’s continue our dive into the names for days of the week! In the case of Tuesday, it at once follows the same pattern, naming the day after the god whose celestial body’s hour was the first hour of the day in the Neo-Babylonion empire (days were broken up into seven hours, so each day began with a new hour.)

In the case of Tuesday, however, it isn’t quite as one-to-one as Sunday (after the sun) and Monday (after the moon) in our English translation.

In that ancient empire, the third day of the week was named for Mars, the planet closest to earth and the god of war. There are plenty of languages that reflect this still, like French’s Mardi.

In Middle English, the word for this day of the week was spelled Tiues-dai. That was, in turn, taken from Old English tiwesdaeg. The Tiwes here is the possessive form of Tiu, who was the god war in Germanic mythology. Interestingly, though, while this ancient god is the equivalent of Mars in many ways, unlike Mars in Roman mythology, Tiu was the supreme god in German mythology, so the name itself is actually more closely related to Zeus.

We already covered Wednesday, so next week, we’ll jump to Thursday!

Word Nerds Merch!