Md. Riday Khan

· 06 Dec 2021

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Why is February shortest month?

The last will be the first is a saying that February was not worth it. The second month of the year according to the Gregorian calendar, the one that we use officially in most of the world and that owes its name to Pope Gregory XIII, its promoter, is the one with the fewest days. Specifically, unlike the other months of the year that move between 30 and 31 days, February usually has only 28 days, and every four years, 29. But do you know why this happens?

The answer lies in the various modifications that have been made to calendars since Roman times. We could say that February is a relatively young month, along with January.

As historians have collected, in the 8th century BC. C, the first Romans used the Romulus calendar, a measurement system that only collected 10 months of which only four had 31 days, and that in total they added up to 304.

Thus, the year began in March and ended in December, so during the days that we now consider to be between January and February, simply, in ancient Rome, citizens did not consider that they were in any month.

The days that were missing in the calendar corresponding to the most arduous months of winter, something that prevented farmers from working and that, for that reason, had led this period to be off the calendar. For them, the almanac only served as a working guide for the field, so if it could not be harvested, it was a time that was not worth recording.

Over time, the Romans needed to align their calendar with the moons and ended up establishing years of 355 days and 12 months. It was then that January and February were added to the list and when, out of sheer superstition, since they wanted the days of the year to be odd, February was left with only 28 days and not 29.

In addition, for a time the emperors, aware of the mismatch in their calendar concerning the Sun, came to add days at will, making some months have more days than others according to their own needs.

Julius Caesar brought the 365 days
But the specific changes were not enough. To try to put some order, in the year 45 BC, as recorded from tiempo.com, Sosigenes de Alejandría, at the request of Julius Caesar himself, drew up a new calendar with 365 days and six hours, the same figure as the Egyptians and the one that best conformed to the solar calendar.

The new ten days were distributed in an orderly manner to each of the months of the year, starting with the first, March, until reaching the penultimate, January. Thus, each month they added one more day and went from having 29 days to 30 or from 30 to 31. The exception was February, which, being the last in the queue, took no extra day and was ratified as the shortest month on the calendar. In addition, it was also established that to avoid the mismatch that existed concerning the solar year, every four years there would be a leap year.

The jump to the Gregorian calendar
In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII gave the calendar one last turn. Due to a lag caused by a small miscalculation of Julius Caesar's team, over the centuries the calendar had become detached from the seasons and made Easter too close to summer, something that greatly displeased the leader. of the church.

Gregory XIII, as reported in the newspaper ABC, wanted the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere to be on March 21 instead of the 11th, as it had begun to happen in the sixteenth century, so he decided to create a new calendar and to tackle the root problem: he decreed that the day after October 4, 1582, would be October 15.

The Pope de facto eliminated 10 days of the year 1582 and compensated for the accumulated imbalance. In addition, he took advantage of and changed the date of the beginning of the year from March 24 to January 1, placing it at the moment that is still used as a reference today and stipulated that, to avoid the lag again, the leap years would continue to be every four years except for those that are divisible by 100 as long as they are not also divisible by 400. Therefore, the years 2100, 2200, or 2300 will not be leap years.

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