TIW'S DAY

One of four days named after Norse gods and the last in this little series I've been doing, Tuesday perhaps has the least obvious etymology of the lot. It's named in honor of the deity Tiw, a war god of sorts who was infamous in mythology for losing a hand to the wolf Fenris. Now, in Middle English, Tuesday was spelled Tewesday, and in Old English, it took the form of tiwesdæg. Here we can separate the dæg (meaning "day", of course), and then it gets interesting. As we go further back in history, Tiw in all his forms and spellings gets more powerful, eventually being associated with the Roman god Mars and getting worshipped as a lord of the sky. Again with the crossover god thing we've seen several times now. In Proto-Germanic, he took the form of Tiwaz, and in Proto-Indo-European as deywos, meaning "god". Dæg comes from Proto-Germanic dagaz, from PIE deg​, meaning "to burn". And that concludes the etymology of weekdays!