Months and days are “bread and butter” Arabic vocabulary but you can get pretty far along in your studies without learning all the different names for each month. I’ve mostly heard the months referred to using ordinal numbers, so that’s what I’ve always called them. A few months ago, though, I was reading the lyrics of 3abali by Ghaliaa and got stuck on the word, نيسان. I looked it up and was embarrassed to realize it means April.

It occurred to me that people with a formal Arabic education background may be used to the traditional names of the months - which aren’t often used in conversation - while those who have learned Arabic more casually or at home may not recognize the traditional names. So, we have put together a comprehensive list of the names for each month and thrown in the days of the week at the bottom for good measure.