Porque os dias da semana têm nomes cristãos?

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A2 Portuguese listening practice · European Portuguese · Curated for beginners

💡 Did you know?

Why do “domingo” and “sábado” break Portuguese’s weekday pattern?

domingo & sábado
Portuguese day-name history lesson
domingo = “the Lord’s day”; sábado = “day of rest”

Portuguese numbers its weekdays — segunda-feira, terça-feira — but domingo and sábado break the pattern, and both names are religious fossils. Domingo comes from the Latin dies dominicus, “the Lord’s day,” marking Sunday as sacred to early Christians. Sábado traces even further back, through Latin sabbatum to the Hebrew Shabbat, “rest” — the same root behind the English “sabbath.”

The other five weekdays are counted from Sunday: segunda-feira is literally “second (holy)day,” terça-feira “third,” and so on through sexta-feira, “sixth” — a numbering system that survived from an early Christian calendar reform while most other Romance languages (Spanish lunes, French lundi) kept the old Roman planet names instead.

Vocabulary frequency

How common is the vocabulary in this A2 Portuguese listening practice listening practice?

95.7%
of words are in the top 2,000 most common Portuguese words
Based on this reel’s transcript, most of the vocabulary is high-frequency, everyday Portuguese.

General Portuguese frequency

85.7%
Top 1,000
95.7%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000

Spoken Portuguese frequency

88.2%
Top 1,000
98.5%
Top 2,000
100%
Top 5,000

Words above this video’s level

Quick glosses for vocabulary that goes beyond this video’s A2 level.

segundafeira
Rare / outside top 5,000
quartafeira
Rare / outside top 5,000
quintafeira
Rare / outside top 5,000
sextafeira
Rare / outside top 5,000
terçafeira
Rare / outside top 5,000
dia do senhor
day of the Lord, religious significance

Source: HermitDave OpenSubtitles 2018 (pt-PT) (general) · OpenSubtitles 2018 (HermitDave, pt-PT) (spoken). Buckets approximate; exact ranks not stored.

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