The seven Croatian days are ponedjeljak, utorak, srijeda, četvrtak, petak, subota and nedjelja. Unlike Serbian, which uses international names (januar, februar), Croatian keeps its own Slavic months: siječanj, veljača, ožujak and so on. Croatian writes days and months with a small letter mid-sentence, and puts the month in the genitive when writing a date.
Published 14 September 2026
If you already know some Serbian or Russian, the Croatian calendar has one surprise waiting: the months. Serbian borrows the international set (januar, februar, mart), and so do Bosnian and Montenegrin in everyday use. Croatian is the one standard of the four that kept the old Slavic names — siječanj, veljača, ožujak — which look nothing like their English cousins. Learn those twelve words and you've cleared the only genuinely unfamiliar part. The days, by contrast, are the same across the region with tiny spelling differences.
Start here, because you'll use these constantly and they carry over from Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin almost unchanged. A quick note on one word: tjedan is the Croatian for "week", while nedjelja means "Sunday". (Serbian uses nedelja for both "week" and "Sunday", which is a common point of confusion — in Croatian, keep them separate.)
| Croatian | English | Literally / note |
|---|---|---|
| ponedjeljak | Monday | the day "after Sunday" (po + nedjelja) |
| utorak | Tuesday | the "second" day (from vtor-, second) |
| srijeda | Wednesday | the "middle" of the week (Serbian: sreda) |
| četvrtak | Thursday | the "fourth" day (from četvrti) |
| petak | Friday | the "fifth" day (from peti) |
| subota | Saturday | from the same root as "Sabbath" |
| nedjelja | Sunday | originally "no work" day (Serbian: nedelja) |
The "literally" column is a memory aid, not a rule to apply — you don't build these words yourself, you just recognise the logic once and the list sticks. To say "on Monday", Croatian uses u plus the accusative: u ponedjeljak, u srijedu, u subotu. If you want the mechanics of that ending, our guide to the accusative case covers exactly this move.
This is the part worth real attention. Each name is a native Slavic word, and most are traditionally tied to what was happening in nature or on the farm that month. Treat that last column as a memory hook: some of these links are widely agreed, a few are traditional and not etymologically certain, so learn the word first and let the story help it stick.
| Croatian month | English | Genitive (for dates) | Traditional sense — memory hook |
|---|---|---|---|
| siječanj | January | siječnja | from sječa, the felling of wood |
| veljača | February | veljače | traditionally linked to the turning of deep winter |
| ožujak | March | ožujka | the windy, "lying" month of unsettled weather |
| travanj | April | travnja | from trava, grass — the fields turn green |
| svibanj | May | svibnja | from svib, the dogwood shrub in flower |
| lipanj | June | lipnja | from lipa, the linden tree in blossom |
| srpanj | July | srpnja | from srp, the sickle — the harvest |
| kolovoz | August | kolovoza | from kola, the carts hauling the harvest |
| rujan | September | rujna | traditionally tied to a reddish colour of autumn |
| listopad | October | listopada | list + pad — leaf-fall |
| studeni | November | studenoga | from studen, cold |
| prosinac | December | prosinca | traditionally connected with the sun beginning to shine again |
Two of these deserve a second look because they don't decline the way you'd expect. Studeni behaves like an adjective — its genitive is studenoga (you'll also see the short form studenog), not "studenija". And most of the others drop the a in their final syllable when you add an ending: siječanj → siječnja, svibanj → svibnja, ožujak → ožujka. That vanishing vowel is called a "fleeting a" — a vowel that appears in the basic form and disappears in the others. You'll meet it all over the language, so it's worth noticing now.
English capitalises Monday and January. Croatian does not. The Institute for the Croatian Language and Linguistics lists days of the week, months and seasons among the words written with a small initial letter. So it's ponedjeljak, siječanj, ljeto (summer) — lowercase inside a sentence. The only time you'll capitalise one is the ordinary one: when it happens to start a sentence. Siječanj je hladan. ("January is cold.") begins with a capital only because it's the first word.
Here's the rule that trips people up. In a Croatian date, the month goes into the genitive case — the "of" form — because a date literally means "the Nth of the month". The day is an ordinal number with a full stop after it, and it also takes a genitive ending when you say "on" that day.
Notice the full stops: after the day number (1.), after the month day (15.) and after the year (2026.) — in Croatian, an ordinal number written as a figure takes a full stop. So a fully written date looks like 15. siječnja 2026. and reads "the fifteenth of January, two thousand and twenty-six".
Cover the answers and turn each English date into Croatian. You'll need the genitive column from the table above. This is a recall drill, not a guessing game — if you miss one, copy the correct form from the table rather than inventing an ending.
Answers: (1) 3. lipnja; (2) 10. listopada; (3) u srijedu; (4) 1. srpnja 2027. If number 4 caught you, remember the "fleeting a": srpanj loses its a to become srpnja.
Learn the twelve month names as words first. The genitive endings and the "of" logic fall into place once the vocabulary is solid.
The months are the single biggest calendar difference between Croatian and its neighbours. If you're learning for Serbia or Montenegro instead, you get the easier international set — our companion piece on days and months in Serbian and Montenegrin lays those out. For the bigger picture of what actually separates the standards, see Croatian versus Serbian differences. And when you want to build Croatian properly from scratch, start with our beginner's roadmap for Croatian.
In the app you meet these words the natural way — u petak, 15. svibnja — inside real sentences and dates, so the genitive endings become a reflex instead of a table you recite. Start your free seven-day trial — no card →