Day of the week
Sunday
“But the child that is born on Sabbath day, is bonny and blithe, good and gay.”
Named for the Sun: dies Solis.
The line above is Sunday's from “Monday's Child” as it is usually printed today, as given in Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951).
The rhyme was first printed by A. E. Bray in A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy (1836), and her version has no line for Sunday. It ends instead with the child born on Christmas Day: “And a child that's born on a Christmas day, / Is fair and wise, good and gay.” The Sunday line came later.
This is folklore recorded from oral tradition, not a claim about anyone born on a Sunday.
Where the name comes from
In Old English the day was sunnandæg, or sunnadæg in Northumbrian: the day of the sun, from sunnan, a form of sunne, the sun. The name is a Germanic loan-translation of the Latin dies solis, which means the same, so English did not replace the Roman name so much as say it in its own words. Monday was made the same way from the moon. The four days after that swapped the Roman gods for Germanic ones, and Saturday alone kept its Roman name.
Word history from the Online Etymology Dictionary's entry for Sunday.
Which dates are a Sunday in 2026
52 dates fall on a Sunday in 2026.