Tuesday

How to spell tuesday

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tuesday

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tuesday mean?

1. nounThe third day of the week, following Monday and preceding Wednesday.

Tuesday in a sentence

• The dentist offered me an appointment next tuesday morning.

• Our weekly team meeting always falls on a tuesday.

Where does tuesday come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English Tiwesdaeg, which literally meant 'the day of Tiw'. Tiw was the Anglo-Saxon god of war and law, a deity closely matched to the Norse Tyr and ultimately related to the same root that gave Latin its word for a god. The name was a direct translation of the Latin dies Martis, 'day of Mars', the Roman war god, because the early Germanic peoples lined up their own gods with the Roman planetary days. That older spelling explains the silent, unexpected first part of the word: the modern 'Tues' preserves the genitive 'Tiwes', so the 'e' before the 'sday' is a fossil of an ancient name rather than a sound you clearly hear. The companion days Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were named the same way, after Woden, Thunor and Frige. The form settled into 'Tuesday' over the medieval and early modern periods as the older spelling smoothed out.

How the word is built

• Tiwes- (genitive of Tiw, an Old English war god)
• day