By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. Seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of days, so a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would over time drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.
For example, February would have 29 days instead of just 28. See Wikia:Licensing.Ī leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing an extra day (or, in case of lunisolar calendars, an extra month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. As with the Calendar Wikia, the text of Wikipedia is available under Creative Commons License. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. and Current Affairs section.This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. Interested in General Knowledge and Current Affairs? Click here to know what is happening around the world with our G.K. Read: 8 facts about Omar Khayyam, the man who gave base to Gregorian calendar The city of Anthony in Texas, US, has an elaborate celebration with birthday parties and parades for these 'Leaplings'. There is a one in 1461 chance of being born on a leap day and people born on this rare day are called 'Leaplings'. These are examples of skipped leap years. We already know that years which are divisible by 4 are leap years, barring exceptions - the Gregorian calendar stated that no leap days would be added in the years ending in "00" unless that year was also divisible by 400.įor example, the year 2000 was a leap year (it is divisible evenly by both 100 and 400), but the years 18 were not leap years (they are both divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400). It is very much possible to calculate leap years and know in advance which years will have a leap day. Since August was a favourite day of August as he had won several battles in this month, Augustus took two days from February and added them to August. But we should note that February didn't always have 28 days.Īs per, February used to have 30 days too but Caesar Augustus, the nephew of Julius Caesar, was not pleased with the fact that the month named after his uncle - July - had 31 days but August didn't. The only reason February was chosen to house this extra day or leap day was that all the other months were already rather "full". So we still have time to figure a way out! Why is there a leap day in February? But we would need another correction soon again since the Gregorian calendar is slightly off as well - but only once every 3030 years. The Gregorian Calendar has the last major change in the western calendar. The way Pope Gregory XIII fine-tuned the calendar year to this extent so long back is impressive indeed. To fix this tiny misalignment and keep the calendar steady for thousands of years, we drop a leap year every few years. This is why we have a concept of skipped leap years.
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