Friday's Child: Birth Day Meaning & Poem

Born on a Friday, your birthday is named for a goddess of love, though scholars can’t fully agree on which one, and the day’s later reputation for bad luck has nothing to do with anyone’s actual birthday.

Where the name Friday comes from

The Romans named the sixth day of their week dies Veneris, “day of Venus,” after their goddess of love and beauty. The Anglo-Saxons swapped in a goddess of their own, giving Old English Frīgedæg, “Frigg’s day,” the ancestor of “Friday.” The usual candidate is Frigg, wife of Odin and goddess of marriage and the hearth; some scholars argue the closer match to Venus is actually Freyja, a separate Norse goddess more directly tied to love and beauty, and a few think Frigg and Freyja may originally have been the same figure who split into two over time. Either way, Friday is the one weekday whose Germanic namesake is genuinely disputed.

The Monday’s Child rhyme for Friday

Friday sits near the end of the Monday’s Child rhyme, with a gentler fortune than its neighbors on either side:

Thursday’s child has far to go, Friday’s child is loving and giving, Saturday’s child works hard for a living,

The rhyme was first widely printed in the 1830s, in A. E. Bray’s Traditions of Devonshire (commonly dated 1838), recording an oral tradition that predates the printing by generations. Friday’s fortune is one of the least stable in the poem: an 1893 novel titled Friday’s Child swapped it with Wednesday’s, giving Friday’s child the “full of woe” line instead, on the logic that Friday had long been considered an unlucky day anyway.

Friday’s other reputation: the 13th

That unlucky reputation shows up again in the modern superstition around Friday the 13th, the fear (formally called paraskevidekatriaphobia) that a month’s 13th day falling on a Friday brings bad luck. It’s worth being precise about what that superstition actually is: it’s about a specific date landing on a specific weekday in a given month, tied to the Gregorian calendar’s quirks about how often the 13th falls on each weekday. It has nothing to do with anyone’s birth weekday, folklore included; being born on a Friday and being born on Friday the 13th are two entirely different things, and only the second one gets the superstition.

Folklore vs the calendar

None of that history changes the arithmetic. Whether you land on a Friday is decided by the Gregorian calendar, not by rhyme or superstition. Our methodology page explains how this site builds your birth date locally in the browser before reading the weekday, the detail that keeps a birth date from silently sliding to the previous day on a UTC-based calculator.

Other weekdays

Step back to Thursday’s child, with far to go, or ahead to Saturday’s child, who works hard for a living. Browse every day on the weekdays hub.

Find your birth weekday

Enter your date in the birthday calculator to see whether you were born on a Friday, alongside age, moon phase, zodiac labels, and milestones.