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What Color is Saturday?

Purple! And Sunday is Red. In Thai culture, each day of the week is associated with a color. Here’s a breakdown of each day and their color:

วันอาทิตย์ (wan ah-tit): Sunday – สีแดง (see daang): Red
วันจันทร์ (wan jan): Monday – สีเหลือง (see leuang): Yellow
วันอังคาร (wan ang-khan): สีชมพู (see champoo): Tuesday – Pink
วันพุธ (wan poot): Wednesday – สีเขียว (see kiaw): Green
วันพฤหัสบดี (wan pa-ru-hat): Thursday -สีส้ม(see som): Orange
วันศุกร์ (wan suk): Friday – สีฟ้า (see fah): Sky Blue
วันเสาร์ (wan sao): Saturday – สีม่วง (see muang): Purple

Each day of the week begins with วัน (wan) which means “day.” If you want to say today, you would add the word for “this.” So it’s วันนี้ (wan nee). Sunday and Monday have similar etymology to the English names of these days. พระอาทิตย์ (phra ah-tit) means “sun “and พระจันทร์ (phra jan) means “moon.” พระ- is a prefix for divine or sacred things in Thai. You can use it to refer to a Buddhist monk.

Similar to how each day starts with วัน (wan), each color starts with สี (see) which means “color.” If you wanted to ask what color something is you could add “what” to the end: สีอะไร (see a-rai). Some other colors that aren’t association with one of the days are:

สีขาว (see khao): white
สีดำ (see dtum): black
สีน้ำเงิน (see nahm ngern): dark blue
สีเทา (see tao): gray
สีน้ำตาล (see nahm dtan): brown

Beyond the connections between specific colors and days of the week, the day of the week that you were born on holds significance in Thai culture similar to how the month or year you were born on is important in some systems like Western astrology or the Chinese Zodiac.  Because of this, many Thai people know the day of the week they were born on whereas I and others I asked from the U.S. did not know without looking it up.

Learning about this actually solved a small personal mystery I encountered growing up and visiting my grandma’s temple in South Carolina. Just like many temples here in Thailand, there were 7 small statues of Buddha lined up with jars beneath them, each in a different pose. Visitors make donations to just one of these jars, but how they chose which jar eluded me until a cousin of mine in Thailand explained it to me during a trip we took together. Each posture is associated with a different day of the week and you should place your offering in the jar below the one that is associated with the day you were born. I had always been partial to the seated Buddha being protected by the Naga (A 7 headed serpent king) because it looked the coolest but it turns out that’s also the one associated with my day of birth. If you’d like to learn more about this, check out this blog post.

Practice matching up colors and days of the week in Thai and English using this tool I made to remember them:

Choose the match:

By the way, I’m a Capricorn , born in the year of the Dragon on a Saturday.

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Thai Chess (หมากรุก: Makruk)

It’s always awesome when seemingly unrelated interests collide. That happened for me last summer when I visited Thailand for the first time. I had brought my chessboard because I’m a huge nerd. One of my Thai co-workers  told me he was a former chess champion so we decided to play a match against one another. We ended up setting the pieces up differently and after some discussion, realized we played two different versions of chess. I ended up learning the rules for Thai chess (หมากรุก: Makruk) along with some new Thai words. I also taught him the rules of International Chess and the English names of the pieces. We played each other in both versions and unsurprisingly I won in the version I knew and he won in the version he knew.  Makruk is said to be the closest modern chess variant to the ancient game from which all known versions are derived (Chaturanga from 6th century India). Here are the names of the pieces in Makruk (along with their literal translation and corresponding chess piece):

เบี้ย (bia) – cowry shell – pawn
เม็ด (met) – seed – queen
โคน (khon) – nobleman or mask – bishop
ม้า (ma) – horse – knight
เรือ (ruea) – boat – rook
ขุน (khun) – lord – king

Differences between International Chess and Thai Chess:

  • Pawns start on the 3rd and 6th ranks instead of the 2nd and 7th (therefore, there is no en passant and no moving forward 2 on their first move)
  • The white king and queen have their starting location swapped, so black and white do not have mirrored positions at the beginning
  • Pawns promote automatically when reaching the 3rd or 6th rank instead of the 1st and 8th and always become a queen (called เบี้ยหงาย [bia-ngai: overturned cowry shell] as opposed to เม็ด )
  • Queens can only move to the squares diagonally adjacent to them, making them arguably the weakest pieces in the game
  • Bishops move like the queens (diagonally adjacent) or to the square directly in front of them
  • There is no castling
  • There are a long set of counting rules similar to the 50-move rule in International Chess, you can read about them here.

You can say รุก (ruk: penetrate) instead of check and just add the word ฆาต (khat: kill) to make รุกฆาต (ruk khat: checkmate). Another fun word to use is กิน (gin: eat) when you capture a piece. For example: ม้ากินเรือ (ma gin ruea: the horse eats the boat, I bet that horse would have a bit of a ปวดท้อง [stomach ache] afterward!).

I modified a couple of javascript libraries made to implement chess to work for Makruk instead, try it out:


The libraries I modified:

  • chess.js by Jeff Hlywa released under the BSD license
  • chessboard.js by Chris Oakman released under MIT license (While working with this one I actually discovered a bug, fixed it and submitted a pull request which was accepted. Technically, my first open source contribution!)
    Original copyrights left in the source code