WTF Is a Leap Year? 📅

orning Leap years!

For some reason, every 4 years, 1 extra day is added to the month of February.

Bumping it up from 28 days to 29 days!

They’re called leap years!

But why do we have em?

To answer this, we gotta go ALLLLLL the way back to Ancient Rome.

Back when it was ruled by this guy:

But Romulus had a bit of a problem…

He was struggling to keep track of the many seasonal festivals that would take place during the year, since there were no calendars back then.

To overcome this little problem, he ordered a 10-month lunar calendar be created.

With each month consisting of either 30 or 31 days.

Trouble is, this didn’t align with the solar year at all…

Meaning it would drift out of sync with the seasons over the years.

See how the first “year” of Romulus’s calendar starts with winter, but by the third it starts most of the way through summer?

Not good at all.

So once Romulus died and the new king, Numa Pompilius, took over, another 2 months were added to the start of the year, January and February.

(He also tweaked the number of days in each month to better align it with the phases of the moon)

And this worked a lot better!

Trouble was, because it focused more on aligning with the lunar cycles, it was also slightly out of sync with the solar year… Not nearly as bad as Romulus’s calendar, but still pretty bad.

But then, a little while later, Julius Caesar came about and was like:

So that's exactly what he did.

There were now 12 months, and they all added up to 365 days in a year.

Perfect!

Except it wasn’t perfect, perfect…

See, there's not actually 365 days in a year, there's 365 +¼ of a day.

Meaning if Rome were to roll with Julius Caesar's new calendar, every hundred years would put the calendar 25 days out of sync!

Thus the leap year was born!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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