The Interesting History Behind February Having 28 Days

It is safe to say that February is the odd one out when talking about the months that make up a year. With just 28 days, it stands different from other months that ranges from that which has 30 days to some with 31 days.

Though February sometimes has 29 days but this only happens occasionally, perhaps only once in a few years when the world enjoys the leap year.

However, the question on the minds of many has always been if this event is naturally occurring or if it is simply man-made?

The answer to this is that it is truly man made and one can always trace the reason for February’s short number of days to the Roman Empire, the very empire that came up with the calendar the world now uses.

To understand the case of February and how it eventually came into existence and obviously has now taken the form of a 28 day month, one needs to understand that the calendar that mentions the use of February was created by the Romans, who at the time of its creation initially used a calendar that had just ten months.

This special or perhaps old calendar was measured or calculated using the moon cycle, which is why it is called Lunar Calendar.

As a ten month calendar, it started in March and ended in December. However, the Romans encountered a problem in the calculation system and a need to review their calendar became obvious.

The reason for the error they encountered in their calendar was because they only attempted to measure the summer and avoided measuring the winter because they believed it was inconsequential to their harvests.

Nonetheless, the important thing to note is that the Roman calendar has always possessed months with just 28 days and according to sources, the month of January and February were both once calculated by the Romans as having just 28 days.

Eventually, a king came into the scene who believed that the number 28 is perhaps responsible for the bad luck Rome was enduring at the time, in his attempts to avoid the harvesting issues that the Romans endured, he added a few days to January but left out February.

Asides from the issue of idea of harvesting issues, the addition of a few days to January as well as other months but leaving out February, managed to help the Romans solve their ten month drifting calendar for a while.

Unfortunately, in the future they encountered the same issues, so they had to go back to retracing their calendar and began to attempt to add or remove from the existing days in an attempt to solve the errors in their calendar.

They soon realize that the ten month calendar was responsible for the errors. So at the time, they added a new month called Mercedonius.

However, the addition of this new month came with a condition; only Roman priests could determine when they month would be added in each year.

What this means is that in each year, a Roman priests would often have to determine, in his discretion what period of the year, be it winter or summer, where the newly added month would come to be.

This manner of additions and subtractions only ended up bringing more errors and the Romans soon realize that a long term solution had to be scheduled or brought in place.

Thankfully the first ever considerably best or good enough calendar was created by the administration of Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, who based the new Roman calendar on cycles of the sun, rather than the moon as previously done.

This was when he came up with 365 day calendar, of course without the famous Mercedonius special month that occasionally appeared in every year.

However, the Romans soon realized that they have miscalculated the solar cycle. This was obvious when they realized that each year, one day keeps disappearing which either makes the calendar deficit by one day or the solar cycle goes beyond the calendar by one day.

Fortunately, this was fixed using February. When this error was to be fixed, the Romans decided not to add any other day to other months, which had already been calculated to have 30 or 31 days, rather, they decided to add it to February since it was missing a few days already.

The birth of the Gregorian calendar fixed the issue of the disappearing day by creating a leap year, this idea of leap year only adds a day to February’s during this special years.

 

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