Wednesday

The Wednesday is internationally standardized by counting ( ISO 8601 , the third) of the week , according to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic count of the fourth (and thus the average ).

The name has been documented or in use since the 10th century , among other things in the form of Old High German mittiwehha (written in Old High German texts by Notker and Otfrid ) and refers to the Christian-Jewish counting of the days of the week. With it, Christian proselytizing in the German-speaking area avoided the echoes of pre-Christian deities, which were retained in the foreign-language terminology: In English , the term Wednesday indicates the god Wodan ( Old English woden , hence wodnesdæg ); in Dutch woensdag and in Low German Wunsdag the word for Wednesday also has this origin. In some sources, Wodan is equated with Mercurius , correspondingly one finds dies Mercurii (day of Mercurius) in Latin . The latter lives on in French. mercredi , romanian. miercuri , ital. mercoledì , span. miércoles and alb. e mërkurë .

In addition to the German language , Icelandic (otherwise Scandinavian but Onsdag after Odin / Wodan), Finnish and most of the Slavic languages derive the name for Wednesday from the word Mitte in the respective language. So it is called, among other things, isl . Miðvikudagur , Finnish. Keskiviikko , Russian and Serbian среда ( Sreda ), Polish środa , Slovak. streda and borrowed from it ung. szerda . The gender of the word Wednesday was originally feminine.

In popular belief, Wednesday was considered a bad day. It was the wedding day for silent weddings (for example, for " fallen girls "). According to the teaching of the Orthodox Church Wednesday was the day on which Judas Iscariot to Jesus Christ sold. That is why Wednesday is usually a day of fasting in the Orthodox Church , as is Friday .