The seven days of the week in Korean are 월요일 (Monday), 화요일 (Tuesday), 수요일 (Wednesday), 목요일 (Thursday), 금요일 (Friday), 토요일 (Saturday) and 일요일 (Sunday). Every name ends in 요일 (yoil, “day of the week”). The first syllable is a Sino-Korean word for a celestial body or classical element: moon, fire, water, wood, metal, earth, sun. Learn those seven syllables and you know the whole set. On calendars and schedules the days shrink to that single syllable: 월, 화, 수, 목, 금, 토, 일. To say “on Monday”, add the time particle 에: 월요일에. To ask what day it is: 오늘 무슨 요일이에요?
What does each day mean?
| Korean | Hanja | Meaning | Pronounced | Day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 월요일 | 月 | Moon | woryoil | Monday |
| 화요일 | 火 | Fire (Mars) | hwayoil | Tuesday |
| 수요일 | 水 | Water (Mercury) | suyoil | Wednesday |
| 목요일 | 木 | Wood (Jupiter) | mogyoil | Thursday |
| 금요일 | 金 | Metal, gold (Venus) | geumyoil | Friday |
| 토요일 | 土 | Earth (Saturn) | toyoil | Saturday |
| 일요일 | 日 | Sun | iryoil | Sunday |
The spellings in the last column follow the Revised Romanization of Korean published by the National Institute of Korean Language. Note that it spells by sound, not by letter. Many older guides write “hwaryoil” for Tuesday and “mokyoil” for Thursday. Both are wrong. There is no r sound in 화요일, and the ㄱ in 목 voices to g before the vowel.
How do you pronounce the days correctly?
Four of the seven names change sound when spoken because a final consonant carries over into the 요 that follows. 월요일 is said woryoil, not wol-yo-il. 일요일 becomes iryoil. 목요일 becomes mogyoil and 금요일 becomes geumyoil. Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday end in vowels, so they sound exactly as written.
This linking rule applies across Korean, so practising it on the days of the week pays off everywhere. You can check any of these entries, with audio, in the Standard Korean Language Dictionary.
How do you use the days in a sentence?
- 월요일에 회의가 있어요. I have a meeting on Monday.
- 화요일에 점심 먹을까요? Shall we have lunch on Tuesday?
- 수요일은 괜찮아요. Wednesday is fine.
- 목요일에 회식이 있어요. There is a work dinner on Thursday.
- 금요일에 영화 보러 가요. Let’s go see a film on Friday.
- 토요일에 친구를 만날 거예요. I am meeting a friend on Saturday.
- 일요일에 뭐 할 거예요? What are you doing on Sunday?
Three patterns cover most situations. 에 marks when something happens. 은/는 makes the day the topic, as in “as for Wednesday”. 마다 means every: 금요일마다 is “every Friday”. Related words you will hear constantly are 평일 (weekday), 주말 (weekend), 이번 주 (this week), 다음 주 (next week) and 지난주 (last week).
How are days written on calendars, tickets and schedules?
Korean dates run from largest unit to smallest, with the day of the week in brackets at the end: 2026년 10월 12일 (월). Train tickets, TV listings, delivery slips and school timetables all use the one-syllable form. Ranges are written with a tilde or hyphen, so a Monday to Friday schedule reads 월~금. Operating hours on a shop door often appear as 월-토 10:00-20:00.
Korean software and web services follow the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository for the Korean locale, which is why the abbreviated forms appear identically on Android, iOS and Windows. Korean calendars display Sunday as the first column, even though the ISO 8601 standard defines Monday as day one. Korean weekly planners sold in stationery shops increasingly start on Monday, so expect both.
Our subtitling and localisation work for Korean clients runs into this constantly. A lower-third that reads “Mon, Oct 12” in the English master becomes 10월 12일 (월) in the Korean version, and the layout has to allow for the bracketed syllable. Shoot schedules shared with Korean crews use 월~금 for the working week. Getting the abbreviation wrong, or writing the full 월요일 where a crew expects 월, marks a document as translated by someone who has never read a Korean call sheet.
Where do the planetary names come from?
The seven-day planetary week reached East Asia through Buddhist astronomical texts in the eighth century and remained a scholarly curiosity for a thousand years. Daily life in Korea ran on the lunisolar calendar and market days, not a seven-day cycle. Korea adopted the Gregorian calendar on 1 January 1896 as part of the Gabo reforms, and the 요일 names entered everyday use with it, using the same celestial sequence that Japan had adopted in 1876.
The order of the seven bodies is identical to the one behind the Latin names that gave French its lundi, mardi and mercredi. Monday is the Moon’s day in both traditions, Tuesday belongs to Mars and fire, Wednesday to Mercury and water, Thursday to Jupiter and wood, Friday to Venus and metal, Saturday to Saturn and earth. The comparative table of weekday names shows how the same Hellenistic sequence travelled east and west. English, by contrast, swapped in Germanic gods for Tuesday to Friday, which is why the English and Korean names only visibly match on Monday, Saturday and Sunday.
Which days matter in Korean daily life?
South Korea has had a statutory five-day working week since the Labor Standards Act was amended in 2004, phased in by company size through 2011. Public schools moved to a full five-day week in 2012. Saturday is therefore a day off for most people, not a half working day as older guides still claim. Weddings cluster on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and the busiest social evening is 금요일 저녁, Friday night.
Television scheduling is organised by paired days, and Koreans refer to dramas by those pairs. 월화드라마 airs Monday and Tuesday, 수목드라마 Wednesday and Thursday, and 주말드라마 at the weekend. If you watch Korean television, these three compound words are the first place you will see the single-syllable forms used in natural speech.
What is the fastest way to memorise them?
Learn the seven Hanja meanings as a sequence rather than seven separate words: moon, fire, water, wood, metal, earth, sun. Then attach 요일 to each. Learners who already know Japanese have nothing to learn at all, since the Japanese names use the same characters in the same order.
Switch your phone’s language to Korean for a week so that every notification, calendar entry and lock screen shows 월, 화, 수 in context. Free structured lessons that include the days of the week are available through the King Sejong Institute Foundation, the Korean government’s language programme, and the beginner audio lessons at Talk To Me In Korean. If you learn from Korean video with a browser extension such as Migaku, mine the days of the week from subtitles rather than from a list. Hearing 금요일에 inside a line of dialogue fixes both the word and the particle in memory at once.
Write today’s date in Korean form, with the day of the week in brackets, at the top of whatever you work on tomorrow, and say it aloud using the linked pronunciation. Do that for seven days and you will have used every name in real context.
