Eight-day week Eight-day week Some historical calendars had "weeks" of eight days. In the Burmese version of Theravada Buddhism, the week has eight days. Wednesday is divided into Wednesday proper (midnight to noon) and Rahu (noon to midnight). Each day is associated with a compass direction, a planet, and a totem animal. The ancient Etruscans developed an eight-day market week known as the nundinum around the 8th or 7th century BC. This was passed on to the Romans no later than the 6th century BC. As Rome expanded, it encountered the seven-day week and for a time attempted to include both. The
Names of the days of the week Sun and Moon ("sunnudagur" and "mánudagur" respectively), while dispensing with the names of the explicitly heathen gods in favour of a combination of numbered days and days whose names are linked to pious or domestic routine ("föstudagur", "Fasting Day" and "laugardagur", "Washing Day"). The "washing day" is also used in other North Germanic languages, but otherwise the names correspond to those of English. The ISO prescribes Monday as the first day of the week with ISO-8601 for software date formats. The Slavic, Baltic and Uralic languages (except Finnish and partially Estonian) adopted numbering but took Monday rather than Sunday as