Days of the week en francais

how many week days in the year

Weekdays, in the ordinary Monday-to-Friday sense, fill most of a year but not all of it. A common year has 365 days, which is 52 full weeks plus one extra day. Those 52 weeks already contain 260 weekdays. The extra day is a weekday only if it falls on Monday through Friday, so a common year has 260 or 261 weekdays. A leap year has 366 days, which is 52 weeks plus two extra days, so the weekday count becomes 260, 261, or 262 depending on which two dates those extras are.

That range is arithmetic, not a civic calendar. Holidays sitting on a Tuesday do not stop being weekdays. They stop being working days for people who have that holiday off. If you needed “how many days I go to the office,” you need a holiday table for your country on top of the 260–262 figure. If you needed “how many Mondays through Fridays exist,” the range above is the answer, and it moves with the leap day and with 1 January’s weekday.

French calendars still use seven named days, not five. Asking how many week days in the year in the same breath as the French names is two questions: the names, and the weekday count. Keep them straight. Lundi through vendredi are the weekdays. Samedi and dimanche are the weekend. The year-count question is about those five, repeated through 52 weeks, plus the leftover day or two.

French will not capitalize mercredi in the middle of a sentence. The day is still Wednesday. It is just not wearing a hat.

The seven names, in order

Learn them as a week that starts on Monday, which is the civil week in France and the ISO week everywhere that uses ISO 8601. Sunday-first lists are a United States habit and will scramble a French school timetable.

lundi — Monday mardi — Tuesday mercredi — Wednesday jeudi — Thursday vendredi — Friday samedi — Saturday dimanche — Sunday None of those seven takes an accent. The trap is mercredi, which English speakers want to write with extra letters, and dimanche, which does not look like “Sunday” and so gets replaced with a guess. Write them until the sequence is muscle memory: lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, dimanche. Saying “Lundi” with a capital L is right at the start of a sentence and in a heading. Inside a sentence, lundi is enough.

Abbreviations you will see on a French month grid are often L M M J V S D, or Lu Ma Me Je Ve Sa Di. Two M’s in a row are mardi and mercredi. If you are filling a bilingual planner, put the French row Monday-first or the weekend will land under the wrong English columns.

Using the names on a real week

A French workplace week is spoken as la semaine, with le week-end for Saturday and Sunday. “En semaine” means on a weekday. If a shop sign says “ouvert du lundi au samedi,” Sunday is the closed day. If it says “sauf le dimanche,” same idea. Do not translate that as a United States Sunday-opening habit. Read the French days as written.

Dates in French often lead with the day of the week: le lundi 3 mars. The article le is part of the habit. You do not need it to recognize the name. You do need it if you are writing a sentence a French teacher will mark. For a calendar tool, printing lundi next to Monday is the whole job. For a sentence, match the article and the lowercase.

Once the seven names are solid, the year-count question becomes a grid exercise: color lundi through vendredi, leave samedi and dimanche, then see whether 1 January and, in a leap year, 29 February, landed in the colored set. That is the only honest way to get from “about 260” to an exact figure for one year. This page will not pick a year and pretend the extras are always Fridays.