Today is the first day of February (I like to state the obvious.)  Haven’t you ever wondered, “Why are there only 28 days in February?”  Doesn’t it seem weird?  Especially considering that there are all these months with 31 days.  Why didn’t they take a couple of days from, say, December and January and add them to February?  Then all the months would have either 30 or 31 days.  Instead, we’ve got this odd 28-day month.

No one’s really sure why February has 28 days, but whatever the real reason is, it probably has to do with the fact that February just never got much love – even though, ironically, it is the month with Valentine’s Day.

A common – though possibly false – explanation is that the Romans took a day from February and tacked it onto August so that it would have the same number of days as July.  Why?  Because August was named in honor of the emperor Augustus, and July was named after Julius Caesar.  At the time, August was a day shorter than July, and whoever named August after Augustus felt these two months should be equal, to reflect the equal stature of the rulers they were named after.  So they took a day from February.  But some historians have refuted this explanation, saying that February has always had 28 days, even before the renaming of August.

I suppose if you really wanted to wrap your head around February’s peculiarity, you’d have to go back to why calendars were invented in the first place.  Our modern calendar is based on the Roman calendar, which was initially made to help people keep track of planting and harvesting seasons.  The original Roman calendar was based on lunar cycles, started with the spring equinox, and had only 10 months.  That’s why September, October, November, and December have the names they do – because they were originally the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months (in Latin, septem = 7, octo = 8, novem = 9, decem = 10).  The other months used to have names that reflected which numbered month they were.  For example, July used to be called Quintilis (the 5th month) and August used to be called Sextilis (the 6th month).

Then second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, added 2 more months (January and February) after December in an effort to make the calendar more accurate by syncing it with the actual lunar year.  He added the 2 extra months because the lunar year had more days in it than the Roman calendar at the time, so he had to make up the difference somehow.  In this new calendar, each month should have had approximately 30 days since there are 355 days in the lunar year, divided among 12 months.

But the problem was, even numbers were considered bad luck back then.  So days were moved around here and there, until 7 months had 29 days and 4 months had 31 days.  That left you with 28 days.  One of the months had to have this unlucky even number of days.  So they chose February.  Why February?  Who knows?  Some say it’s because at the time February was the last month in the calendar.  It was also in the middle of winter, so it wasn’t that important to the planting and harvesting season.  Plus, if there had to be an unlucky month, might as well make it the short one.  It also may be related to its name – February comes from the word februare means “to purify,” and it was during this time that Romans honored the dead and performed purification rites.

Eventually, Julius Caesar came along and decided it would be better to have a solar-based calendar, with 365.25 days (365 for 3 years and 366 days in a leap year) because the 355-day lunar calendar wasn’t working out so great.  Since the lunar calendar didn’t account for the time it took for the Earth to orbit the sun, it couldn’t stay in sync with the seasons, which was the whole point of making the calendar in the first place – to keep track of when to plant and when to harvest.

The Egyptians, by the way, were way ahead of the game on this front.  They had a solar based calendar long before Caesar came along.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is probably way more information than you cared to know about February. 

But if it, in fact, wasn’t enough and you’re hankering for more, here and here you go.