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My original question was: Why is summer not capitalized like Monday and June. After some research, my question became the one in the title.

From a shallow google search, I've read that months and weekdays are proper nouns is because the names refer to a specific day of the week or month of the year. This is corroborated by the accepted answer here. However, the answer below has a higher score than the accepted answer...

This answer justifies the weekdays are proper nouns convention with the fact that "they were formed from the names of old pagan gods...". Though, that's only true for most of the days (i.e. not Sunday and Monday).

Doing another shallow google search, I found that the names of the months are also derived from the name gods. This time they were Roman.

From what I have read, the names of seasons don't have the same origin; They appear to come from older base words.

Maybe I've answered my own question, but I would like to open this discussion to everyone so there can be a common consensus.

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  • Most months were not named for Roman gods. December, for example, was the 10th month ("decem" = "ten").
    – MarcInManhattan
    Commented Apr 26, 2022 at 23:32
  • I'm not sure you'll get a better answer than tradition. You could note that a lot of terms for time of year, time of week, time of day, etc, aren't capitalised: "hurricane season", "midwinter", "midweek", "weekend", "noon", "morning", etc, although the likes of "Advent", "Christmastide", or "Easter" are. I guess it's the difference between a proper name (depending on your philosophical theory of how proper nouns function) and a common noun (which is a predicate).
    – Stuart F
    Commented Apr 27, 2022 at 10:14
  • There are spelling conventions (that were invented along with writing) and then there is grammar which is how people speak. Is proper noun a distinct part of speech different from noun? If we had rules about this we could check them against seasons, months, days of the week, etc.
    – Mitch
    Commented Apr 27, 2022 at 14:33

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I think seasons are like colours on a palette which are not capitalised either. They are imprecise terms and are not neatly delineated, concrete entities; the changeover between them (like colours) is imperceptible and gradual.

From metoffice.gov.uk there are two definitions: One is defined by the Earth's axis and orbit around the Sun and the second is a fixed date which is used by meteorologists for consistent spacing and lengths of the seasons. Geophysical factors affect the seasons. My personal rule is that summer ends starts when it looks like autumn in my garden.

Seasons are fundamentally different from days or months, so uncapitalised makes sense to me!

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