Day of the week
Day of the week
Reading today’s date…
Find the weekday for any date — your birthday, a date in history, or one years ahead — on a calendar you can browse.
What it does
Type a date or click one on the calendar and it tells you the weekday — Monday, Tuesday, whichever it is. The calendar browses to any month of any year, forward or back, so the same tool answers what day your birthday fell on, what day the Fourth of July landed on in 1776, and what day March 2nd, 2035 will be. It opens on today, with today highlighted, so it doubles as a quick answer to what day it is right now.
What day of the week were you born?
Pick your date of birth and the weekday appears, along with the line the traditional Monday's Child rhyme gives that day — Monday's child is fair of face, Wednesday's child is full of woe, and so on. It is a folk rhyme, not a horoscope, but it is the thing most people are half-remembering when they ask what their birth day means. The same lookup works for anyone's birthday, and for the day any historical event fell on.
How the weekday is worked out
The weekday comes from the date alone, using the proleptic Gregorian calendar and plain integer arithmetic — not from your device's clock, beyond reading today's date to highlight it. That makes the answer the same for everyone, in every time zone, for any year. Leap years follow the full Gregorian rule: divisible by four, except centuries, unless divisible by four hundred, which is why 2000 was a leap year and 1900 was not.
A note on very old dates
Before a country adopted the Gregorian calendar, the weekday people wrote down could differ from the one shown here. Britain and its American colonies switched in September 1752, dropping eleven days to catch up; Russia did not switch until 1918. For dates in that era the calculator gives the Gregorian weekday, which is the modern convention and the one used to date historical events, but it is not what a diary of the day would necessarily have said.
Questions
- What day of the week was I born on?
- Enter your date of birth in the date field, or browse the calendar to your birth month and click the day. The tool names the weekday and shows the traditional Monday's Child line for it. Nothing is sent anywhere — the answer is calculated in your browser.
- Does it work for dates in the future?
- Yes. The weekday of a future date is fixed by the calendar, so you can check what day a wedding, a deadline or a birthday years ahead will fall on — the same way you can look one up in the past.
- Why does an old date's weekday look wrong to me?
- The calculator uses the Gregorian calendar for every date. Countries adopted it at different times — Britain and its colonies in 1752 — so for dates before then the historical Julian weekday can differ. The Gregorian weekday shown is the modern standard used to date historical events.
- Which day does the week start on?
- The grid starts each week on Sunday, the common United States convention, with Saturday and Sunday marked as the weekend. The weekday of a date does not change with that choice; it only changes which column a date sits in.
- Is my date sent to a server?
- No. The whole calculation runs in your browser from the date you pick. The only thing the tool reads from your device is today's date, so it can highlight today when it opens.