eli5: Why does July & August have 31 days but February has only 28 ?
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February was historically the last month of the year because the Calendar would start in spring.
In the earlier Roman era they weren’t entirely sure how long the year was, so in winter they would have a period of days that was outside the calendar. It was winter and nothing of significance was happening anyway.
Eventually they reformed the calendar to make it more consistent year by year and added a couple more months so that the calendar would apply to a whole solar year. Once they figured out the year was actually 365 days long they added whatever remaining days required to February which wasn’t quite the 30 they needed. Hence Feb ended up with 28.
The first month of the year was March, which corresponded (at least for a time) when the Romans would pick their new leaders and it was when the Armies could march.
(March’s name is derived from Mars the God of war, and so is the word march)
So why didn’t the even out the days? or change the months to make them make more sense?
It’s a case of “We’ve been doing this way for almost 2000 years, so why change it?”
The changes we have made to the calendar since were to add Leap years
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