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The modern Chinese names for the days of the week are based on a simple numerical sequence. The word for "week" is followed by a number indicating the day: "Monday" is literally the "Stellar Period One"/"Cycle One", that is, the "First day of the Stellar Period/Cycle", etc.
Friedrich Delitzsch and others suggested that the seven-day week being approximately a quarter of a lunation is the implicit astronomical origin of the seven-day week, [23] and indeed the Babylonian calendar used intercalary days to synchronize the last week of a month with the new moon. [24]
The Finnish name is keskiviikko ('middle of the week'), as is the Icelandic name: miðvikudagur, and the Faroese name: mikudagur ('mid-week day'). Some dialects of Faroese have ónsdagur, though, which shares etymology with Wednesday. Danish, Norwegian, Swedish onsdag, (Ons-dag meaning Odens dag 'Odin's day').
Likewise, the Modern Hebrew name for Monday is yom-sheni (יום שני). While in North America, Sunday is the first day of the week, the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization places Monday as the first day of the week in its ISO 8601 standard. Monday is xīngqīyī (星期一) in Chinese, meaning "day one of the week".
The planetary hours are an ancient system in which one of the seven classical planets is given rulership over each day and various parts of the day. Developed in Hellenistic astrology, it has possible roots in older Babylonian astrology, and it is the origin of the names of the days of the week as used in English and numerous other languages.
In the Persian language, Thursday is referred to as panj-shanbeh, meaning 5th day of the week. Vietnamese refers to Thursday as Thứ năm (literally means "day five"). Quakers traditionally referred to Thursday as "Fifth Day" eschewing the pagan origin of the English name "Thursday". [9]
The name Tuesday derives from the Old English Tiwesdæg and literally means "Tiw's Day". [2] Tiw is the Old English form of the Proto-Germanic god *Tîwaz , or Týr in Old Norse . *Tîwaz derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *dei- , *deyā- , *dīdyā- , meaning 'to shine', whence comes also such words as " deity ".
The modern Māori name for Saturday, rāhoroi, literally means "washing-day" – a vestige of early colonized life when Māori converts would set aside time on the Saturday to wash their whites for Church on Sunday. [16] A common alternative Māori name for Saturday is the transliteration hātarei.