Have you ever wondered why there are only 28 days in February?
You look at other months and notice that they either have 30 or 31 days. How come February gets the “short end of the stick”?
The answer to this question comes from the Ancient Romans.
The Ancient Romans originally followed the Roman calendar. Their calendar consisted of ten months, starting in March and ending in December. During this time, King Romulus decided that the time between December and March was unimportant because it didn’t involve the harvest season. They followed this calendar all the way until sometime around 700 B.C. It was during this time that King Numa Popilius implemented the 12-month calendar to better track the 12 lunar cycles of the year. This new calendar was called the Julian calendar and had 355 days. These amounts of days were divided to have months of 29 to 30 days in length.
The only issue with this was that the ancient Romans considered even numbers to be bad luck. To fix this, they decided to make February 28 days long. The reason February was chosen was that it was during this time that the Romans performed rites of purification and honored the dead. Unfortunately, issues began to occur with this calendar. The main issue was that the seasons and months fell out of sync. This issue was solved around 45 BCE, when Julius Caesar commissioned an expert to create a sun-based calendar. This new calendar, which was created, was 365 days long and each month alternated between 30 and 31 days. The only month that didn’t have this many days was February. This also ignores that every four years is a leap year, which means there is an extra day in February. The reason for leap years is to keep our 365-day calendar in sync with the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Without a leap year, seasons would drift, causing the calendar to be off by about 25 days over a century. The rule that a leap year tends to follow is that to be a leap year, it has to be able to be divided by four.
The next leap year, as of this article’s publication, will be in 2028.
