How to paste a string on each element of a vector of strings using apply in R?

Other have already indicated that since paste is vectorised, there is no need to use apply in this case.

However, to answer your question: apply is used for an array or data.frame. When you want to apply a function over a list (or a vector) then use lapply or sapply (a variant of lapply that simplifies the results):

sapply(d, paste, "day", sep="")
        Mon        Tues      Wednes       Thurs         Fri       Satur 
   "Monday"   "Tuesday" "Wednesday"  "Thursday"    "Friday"  "Saturday" 
        Sun 
   "Sunday" 

No need for apply(), just use paste():

R> d <- c("Mon","Tues","Wednes","Thurs","Fri","Satur","Sun")
R> week <- paste(d, "day", sep="")
R> week
[1] "Monday"    "Tuesday"   "Wednesday" "Thursday"  
[4] "Friday"    "Saturday"  "Sunday"   
R>