Why February had 28 days ??
give me full details plz.
Answers
February’s 28 days date back to the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius. Before he became king, Rome’s lunar calendar was just 10 months long. It began in March and ended in December. At the time, Romulus, the first king of Rome, and his people found the time between December and March to be unimportant because it had nothing to do with the Harvest.
When Numa Pompilius took reign, he decided to make the calendar more accurate by lining it up with the year’s 12 lunar cycles. The new 355-day year needed two additional months to make up for the lost time. So he added January and February to the end of the calendar.
Because Romans believed even numbers to be unlucky, each month had an odd number of days, which alternated between 29 and 31. But, in order to reach 355 days, one month had to be an even number. February was chosen to be the unlucky month with 28 days.
According to Slate, this choice may be due to the fact that Romans honored the dead and performed rites of purification in February. In fact, the word februare means "to purify" in the dialect of the ancient Sabine tribe.
After a few years of using the Numa Pompilius’ new 355-day calendar, the seasons and months began to fall out of sync. In an attempt to realign the two, the Romans added a 27-day leap month as needed. If Mercedonius was used, it began on February 24.
Because the leap month was inconsistent, this too had its obvious flaws. In 45 B.C., Julius Caesar commissioned an expert to create a sun-based calendar like the one the Egyptians used. The Julian Calendar added a little more than 10 days to each year, making each month either 30 or 31 days long, except for February. To account for the entire 365.25 day-long year, one day was added to February every four years, now known as a “leap year.” During most years, this left February with just 28 days.
According to mental_floss, to get Rome on track with the Julian Calendar, the year 46 BCE had to be 445 days long!
hope it helps...please mark as brainliest !
Each month in the modern Gregorian calendar consists of at least 28 days. That number would be a nicely rounded 30 were it not for February. While every month besides the second in the calendar contains at least 30 days, February falls short with 28 (and 29 on a leap year). So why is the most widely used calendar in the world so inconsistent in the lengths of its months? And why is February stuck with the fewest number of days? Blame it on Roman superstition.
The Gregorian calendar’s oldest ancestor, the first Roman calendar, had a glaring difference in structure from its later variants: it consisted of 10 months rather than 12. In order to fully sync the calendar with the lunar year, the Roman king Numa Pompilius added January and February to the original 10 months. The previous calendar had had 6 months of 30 days and 4 months of 31, for a total of 304 days. However, Numa wanted to avoid having even numbers in his calendar, as Roman superstition at the time held that even numbers were unlucky. He subtracted a day from each of the 30-day months to make them 29. The lunar year consists of 355 days (354.367 to be exact, but calling it 354 would have made the whole year unlucky!), which meant that he now had 56 days left to work with. In the end, at least 1 month out of the 12 needed to contain an even number of days. This is because of simple mathematical fact: the sum of any even amount (12 months) of odd numbers will always equal an even number—and he wanted the total to be odd. So Numa chose February, a month that would be host to Roman rituals honoring the dead, as the unlucky month to consist of 28 days.
ADVERTISEMENT
Despite changes in the calendar as it was altered after Numa’s additions—alterations that include the shortening of February at certain intervals, the addition of a leap month, and eventually the modern leap day—February’s 28-day length has stuck.
newsletter icon
LIKE OUR BRITANNICA STORIES?
Sign up here to get more Demystified stories delivered right to your inbox!
Email address
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice.
DEMYSTIFIED / SOCIETY, LITERATURE & LANGUAGE, HISTORY
Is It ISIS or ISIL?
WRITTEN BY: Jonathan Hogeback
SHARE:
Government officials are erasing graffiti of Islamic State (ISIS) banner in Solo, Java, Indonesia.
© Garudeya /Shutterstock.com
English-speaking countries and news agencies have an aversion to long names. So when the jihadist militant group that called itself الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام, or “The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,” entered the world political sphere, it was referred to with a simple acronym. Well, it was intended to be a simple acronym. News outlets, and common citizens by influence, began to call the group ISIS, short for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. However, some political figures, including the president of the United States, Barack Obama, use the acronym ISIL, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. So what is the underlying difference between the two acronyms: ISIS and ISIL? And why do some people say one, and some say the other?
When the group started to gain notoriety in the press and politics, confusion over just how to shorten its name in English arose from one tricky phrase: al-Sham. The term has no direct translation in English and refers to Greater Syria, the geographic area in the Middle East that the group desires for its vision of an Islamic state. The English word closest in meaning to “al-Sham” is the dated name for a slightly overlapping geographic area: the Levant, which spans the countries of Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. Therefore, the acronym ISIL is the more-accurate name, as it recognizes these areas that the group affects and targets, while ISIS refers exclusively to Iraq and Syria. The tendency to call the group ISIS arose as they became active militants in the Syrian civil war in 2012. Though less accurate, the name ISIS has become entrenched in the international lexicon and is still used by many politicians and news companies.
Many world leaders have taken to using the name Daesh to refer to the group, rather than ISIS or ISIL. This name is also an acronym, but one that takes from the Arabic words in the group’s longer moniker. The phonetic sound of the acronym is intended to be unpleasant, and the rare use of an acronym in Arabic is meant to attribute disrespect to the group and to ignore the meaning behind its longer name. In the midst of the confusion and name calling, since 2014 the group has decided to call itself the shorter and to-the-point Islamic State, or IS.
if you find it useful than mark it as brainist and follow me please