: why are some months 31 days or 30 days and why can’t they all be the same.
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10 months.
Each month is 36 days
Weeks are now nine days with six working and three off.
5 days off every year for a holiday break. Whole country shuts down and you enjoy it with your family.
I feel 5% less stupid thank you for the answers
13 months, each 28 days would be 364 days. Add an extra day at year end/beginning that is not a part of either month and maintain February as is. 4 weeks, 13 months, Peace on Earth Day.
We use a solar calendar, so one year is the length of time that it takes the Earth to orbit the sun – 365.25 days. With 12 months, you can’t have all the months have the same number of days, because 365 isn’t a multiple of 12. So at a minimum, you could go away with having 7 months at 30 days each, and 5 months at 31 days each.
But the reason that we have a 28 day month (February) goes back to the Roman calendar. The Roman calendar was 355 days, because it was a Lunar calendar – 12 lunar months, or 355 days. Roman superstition was that an even number of days in a month was unlucky, so they made every month either 29 days, or 31 days. Of course, you need at least one even numbered month in order for the total to be an odd number… so they picked February to be the unlucky month, and gave it 28 days.
We kept the convention when we switched from the lunar calendar to the solar calendar… now most months are 30 or 31 days, but February stays at 28.
Because there are 365 (and roughly a quarter, which is taken care of by leap year) solar days (amount of time the earth spins once on it’s axis) in a solar year (the amount of time earth rotates once around the sun). 365 factors into the prime numbers 5 and 73. So the only way to have the same number of days in a month is to have 5 months that are 73 days long each or 73 months that are 5 days each.
If they were all 30 days, the year would be 360 days; that’s too short, because the earth takes about 365.25 to go round the sun. If they were all 31, the year would be 372; that’s too long.
The calendar needs to have a specific amount of days or it will get out of sync with solar time. Someone figured out that having 12 months of which 7 have 31 days, 4 have 30 days and one has 28 or 29 days depending on the year works quite well without getting too much out of sync. It still isn’t perfect, though, and misaligns about 27 seconds every year.
Take 365 days.
Now divide it by 12.
You get 30.42. Quite awkward! If all months were the same length, you’d either have an extra week dangling off the end of the year or you’d come up short! Of course you can’t change the number of days in a year, since its synced to the planet’s orbit. A year with 372 days would result in the seasons slowly drifting around (good old snowfall in the US in July, eh?). In fact they already do because the 365 days thing isn’t perfectly spot on – that’s why you need leap years.
You mean 13 months of 28 days, with 1 day left over, to be used as the New Years celebration day
This way, every saturday is a 7th, 14th, 21st or 28th. Every month
We could. If we don’t mind, e.g., Midsummer’s Day being in June one year and in December a few years later.
The actual year – the time it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun – isn’t a convenient length; it doesn’t divide up neatly, and there’s nothing that we can do about that.
So we can (a) either muck around with different length months, and leap years, and so on, so that our calendar years keep in step with actual years, or (b) we can watch the months slide slowly across the actual year, and the seasons. We choose to do the first.
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