Sunday

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Sunday (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Sundae.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by
adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
(September 2013)
Sunday (
i
/snde/ or /sndi/) is the day of the week following Saturday but before Monday.
For most Christians, Sunday is observed as a day of worship of God and to rest, due to the belief
that it is the Lord's Day, the day of Christ's resurrection. Sunday is a day of rest in most Western
countries, part of 'the weekend'. In some Muslim countries, Sunday is a normal working day
whereas Friday is the day of rest, when Muslims go to jummah prayer.
[citation needed]
According to
the Hebrew calendars and traditional Christian calendars, Sunday is the first day of the week, and
according to the International Organization for Standardization ISO 8601 Sunday is the seventh
and last day of the week. No century in the Gregorian calendar starts on a Sunday, whether its
first year is '00 or '01.
[1]
The Jewish New Year never falls on a Sunday. (The rules of the Hebrew
calendar are designed such that the first day of Rosh Hashanah will never occur on the first,
fourth, or sixth day of the Jewish week; i.e., Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday).
Contents
Etymology

A depiction of Mni, the personified moon, and his sister Sl, the personified sun, from Norse
mythology (1895) by Lorenz Frlich.

Sunday is named after our Sun
Sunday, being the day of the Sun, as the name of the first day of the week, is derived from
Egyptian astrology, where the seven planets, known in English as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun,
Venus, Mercury and the Moon, each had an hour of the day assigned to them, and the planet
which was regent during the first hour of any day of the week gave its name to that day. During
the 1st and 2nd century, the week of seven days was introduced into Rome from Egypt, and the
Roman names of the planets were given to each successive day.
The Teutonic nations seem to have adopted the week as a division of time from the Romans, but
they changed the Roman names into those of corresponding Teutonic deities. Hence, the dies
Solis became Sunday (German, Sonntag).
The English noun Sunday derived sometime before 1250 from sunedai, which itself developed
from Old English (before 700) Sunnandg (literally meaning "sun's day"), which is cognate to
other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian sunnandei, Old Saxon sunnundag, Middle
Dutch sonnendach (modern Dutch zondag), Old High German sunnun tag (modern German
Sonntag), and Old Norse sunnudagr (Danish and Norwegian sndag, Icelandic sunnudagur and
Swedish sndag). The Germanic term is a Germanic interpretation of Latin dies solis ("day of
the sun"), which is a translation of the Ancient Greek hemra helou.
[2]
The p-Celtic Welsh
language also translates the Latin "day of the sun" as dydd Sul.
In most Indian languages, the word for Sunday is Ravivra or Adityavra or its derived forms
vra meaning day, Aditya and Ravi both being a style (manner of address) for Surya, the chief
solar deity and one of the Adityas. Ravivra is first day cited in Jyotish, which provides logical
reason for giving the name of each week day. In the Thai solar calendar of Thailand, the name
("Waan Arthit") is derived from Aditya, and the associated color is red.
In Russian the word for Sunday is (Voskreseniye) meaning "Resurrection".
[3]
In
other Slavic languages the word means "no work", for example Polish: Niedziela, Ukrainian:
i, Belorussian: , Croatian: Nedjelja, Serbian and Slovenian: Nedelja, Czech:
Nedle,Bulgarian: .
The Modern Greek word for Sunday, , is derived from (Lord) also, due to its
liturgical significance as the day commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, i.e. The Lord's
Day.
Position in the week
ISO 8601
The international standard ISO 8601 for representation of dates and times, states that Monday is
the first day of the week. This method of representing dates and times unambiguously was first
published in 1988.
Culture and languages
Main article: Names of the days of the week Numbered days of the week
In the Judaic, some Christian, as well as in Islamic tradition, Sunday has been considered as the
first day of the week. A number of languages express this position either by the name for the day
or by the naming of the other days. In Hebrew it is called yom rishon, in Arabic al-
ahad, in Persian and related languages yek-shanbe, all meaning "first". In Greek, the
names of the days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (", ",",
"," and "") mean "second," "third", "fourth", and "fifth," respectively. This leaves
Sunday in the first position of the week count. The current Greek name for Sunday,
(Kyriake), means "Lord's Day" coming from the word (Kyrios), which is the Greek word
for "Lord". Similarly in Portuguese, where the days from Monday to Friday are counted as
Segunda-feira, Tera-feira, Quarta-feira, Quinta-feira and Sexta-feira, while Sunday itself similar
to Greek has the name of "Lord's Day" (domingo). In Vietnamese, the working days in the week
are named as: "Th Hai" (second day), "Th Ba" (third day), "Th T" (fourth day), "Th Nm"
(fifth day), "Th Su" (sixth day), "Th By" (seventh day). Sunday is called "Ch Nht," a
corrupted form of "Cha Nht" meaning "Lord's Day." Some colloquial text in the south of
Vietnam and from the church may still use the old form to mean Sunday.
Slavic languages implicitly number Monday as day number one, not two. For example, Polish
has czwartek (4th) for Thursday and pitek (5th) for Friday. Hungarian pntek (Friday) is a
Slavic loanword, so the correlation with "five" is not evident to Hungarians. Hungarians use
Vasrnap for Sunday, which means "market day". Bulgarian and Russian
(Monday) literally mean "after no work", Russian (Tuesday) means
"second day", (Wednesday) means "middle day", (Thursday) means "fourth day",
(Friday) means "fifth day", (Saturday) means "sabbath", and
(Sunday) means or "resurrection (of Jesus)" (that is the day of a week which commemorates it).
In Old Russian Sunday was also called "free day" or "day with no work", but in the
contemporary language this word means "week".