Do you ever wonder why February is the only month with 28 days? Or sometimes 29 days? Every other month gets at least 30 days, but not poor February. What do you think? Was it bad luck? A mistake? Or did someone just forget to give it extra days?
The answer to this mystery will take us thousands of years ago to the time when people were still figuring out how to measure time and days.
- The birth of calender: Ancient people used to track time using the sun and the moon long before smartphones and digital calendars were a thing. They noticed the moon went through its phases in about 29.5 days, so they created lunar calendars based on the cycle of the moon. However, there was a problem with this system. A year made of 12 lunar months only added up to about 354 days, which was 11 days too short compared to the time it actually takes Earth to orbit the sun.
To solve this problem, different civilisations tried different approaches. The Egyptians created a 356-days calendar based on the rotation of the Sun. The Babylonians followed the lunar calendar but they added extra months now and then to try to fix the problem. And the Romans, who are responsible for the modern day calendar, started something very odd. They created a 10-month-a-year calendar!
- The odd Roman calendar: The earliest Roman calendar had only 10 months. It started with the month March and ended with the month December, which literally means “tenth month”. In this calendar the year was only 304 days long and winter months were ignored! But as Rome grew, they realised they couldn’t just skip two months every year.
Around 713 BCE, King Numa Pompilius added January and February to the calendar to make up for the missing time. But they had something odd here as well. The Romans believed even numbers were unlucky, so they made almost every month 29 or 31 days long.
That left February with 28 days making it the shortest and unfortunately, the most unlucky month. It also became the month of purification rituals and honoring the dead.
- Julius Caesar steps in: This calendar still wasn’t perfect. The Romans kept adding extra days and months randomly making a mess of things. Enter Julius Caesar in the process who in 45 BCE decided to fix this mess by creating leap years.
He introduced the Julian Calendar, making the year 365 days long, based on the Egyptian solar calendar. Since the Earth takes 365.25 days to go around the Sun, he added an extra day every four years to February creating the system of leap years .
This worked well but not entirely perfectly.
- The final fix: The Gregorian calendar: By the 16th century, the Julian Calendar was off by 10 days because the extra leap days were adding too much time. To fix this, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 which is the one we use today.
The rule?
– A leap year happens every 4 years.
– But century years (like 1700, 1800, 1900) are not leap years unless they’re divisible by 400 (so 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not).
This small adjustment made the calendar accurate!
So, why is February still so short? Even after all these changes? In my opinion, nobody bothered to give February extra days. It just stayed the oddball month with 28 days most years and 29 on leap years. So, the next time someone complains that February is too short, just tell them to blame the Romans. And maybe Julius Caesar. And while they are at it throw in Pope Gregory XIII too.
February is like that one friend of the other months who always gets left out, but at least it gets a bonus day every four years as an apology!