kuupäeva

Kuupäev, in Estonian, refers to a calendar date—the specific day within a given month and year. In everyday language it is used to identify appointments, deadlines, events, and other time-bound information. The genitive form kuupäeva appears in various grammatical contexts, such as in phrases describing a date’s characteristics or changes.

The word kuupäev is a compound of kuu (moon) and päev (day). Historically, it denotes the day within a lunar month, a meaning that has carried over into the modern concept of the date in the civil calendar. Today it simply designates the day, month, and year that identify a point in time.

Date notation in Estonian is usually written as day.month.year, for example 7.04.2025 or 07.04.2025, with periods acting as separators. Leading zeros are common in official formats, and the arrangement generally follows day first, then month, then year. In international or technical contexts, the ISO 8601 format YYYY-MM-DD is used, such as 2025-04-07, to avoid ambiguity across languages.

In practical use, kuupäev appears on documents, forms, calendars, and digital interfaces as a label and a data field. The inflected form kuupäeva commonly occurs in phrases like kuupäeva muutmine (changing the date) or kuupäeva tähistamine (celebration of the date), reflecting Estonian’s flexible case system. The concept remains central to timekeeping, scheduling, and record-keeping in Estonian.