A calendar date is a reference to a particular day represented within a calendar system. The calendar date allows the specific day to be identified. The number of days between two dates may be calculated. For example, "25 January 2025" is ten days after "15 January 2025". The date of a particular event depends on the observed time zone. For example, the air attack on Pearl Harbor that began at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian time on 7 December 1941 took place at 3:18 a.m. Japan Standard Time, 8 December in Japan.
A leap year is a calendar year that contains an additional day compared to a common year. The 366th day is added to keep the calendar year synchronised with the astronomical year or seasonal year. Since astronomical events and seasons do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars having a constant number of days each year will unavoidably drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track, such as seasons. By inserting ("intercalating") an additional day—a leap day—or month—a leap month—into some years, the drift between a civilization's dating system and the physical properties of the Solar System can be corrected.
The International Fixed Calendar was a proposed reform of the Gregorian calendar designed by Moses B. Cotsworth, first presented in 1902. The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was never officially adopted at the country level, the entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until 1989. While it is sometimes described as the 13-month calendar or the equal-month calendar, various alternative calendar designs share these features.
The World Calendar is a proposed reform of the Gregorian calendar created by Elisabeth Achelis of Brooklyn, New York in 1930.
The Julian day is a continuous count of days from the beginning of the Julian period; it is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events.
As a moveable feast, the date of Easter is determined in each year through a calculation known as computus paschalis – often simply Computus – or as paschalion particularly in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. Determining this date in advance requires a correlation between the lunar months and the solar year, while also accounting for the month, date, and weekday of the Julian or Gregorian calendar. The complexity of the algorithm arises because of the desire to associate the date of Easter with the date of the Jewish feast of Passover which, Christians believe, is when Jesus was crucified.
The epact used to be described by medieval computists as the age of a phase of the Moon in days on 22 March; in the newer Gregorian calendar, however, the epact is reckoned as the age of the ecclesiastical moon on 1 January. Its principal use is in determining the date of Easter by computistical methods. It varies from year to year, because of the difference between the solar year of 365–366 days and the lunar year of 354–355 days.
Dominical letters or Sunday letters are a method used to determine the day of the week for particular dates. When using this method, each year is assigned a letter depending on which day of the week the year starts with. The Dominical letter for the current year 2025 is E.
Calendar reform or calendrical reform is any significant revision of a calendar system. The term sometimes is used instead for a proposal to switch to a different calendar design.
The determination of the day of the week for any date may be performed with a variety of algorithms. In addition, perpetual calendars require no calculation by the user, and are essentially lookup tables. A typical application is to calculate the day of the week on which someone was born or a specific event occurred.
The Tabular Islamic calendar is a rule-based variation of the Islamic calendar. It has the same numbering of years and months, but the months are determined by arithmetical rules rather than by observation or astronomical calculations. It was developed by early Muslim astronomers of the second hijra century to provide a predictable time base for calculating the positions of the moon, sun, and planets. It is now used by historians to convert an Islamic date into a Western calendar when no other information is available. Its calendar era is the Hijri year. An example is the Fatimid or Misri calendar.
The Doomsday rule, Doomsday algorithm or Doomsday method is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. It provides a perpetual calendar because the Gregorian calendar moves in cycles of 400 years. The algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway in 1973, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll's perpetual calendar algorithm. It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week upon which certain easy-to-remember dates, called the doomsdays, fall; for example, the last day of February, April 4 (4/4), June 6 (6/6), August 8 (8/8), October 10 (10/10), and December 12 (12/12) all occur on the same day of the week in the year.
The Pax calendar was invented by James A. Colligan, SJ in 1930, as a perennializing reform of the annualized Gregorian calendar.
The ISO week date system is effectively a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) since 1988 and, before that, it was defined in ISO (R) 2015 since 1971. It is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping. This was previously known as "Industrial date coding". The system specifies a week year atop the Gregorian calendar by defining a notation for ordinal weeks of the year.
An annual calendar is a representation of the year that expires with the year represented, or that must be altered annually to remain current. The term takes different but related meanings across two contexts. One is for static (synchronic) calendars, such as wall calendars or calendar systems. The other is for dynamic (diachronic) calendars, such as digital calendars or timepieces. Static representations of the Gregorian calendar year are annual, because the weekdays of Gregorian dates vary from year to year. The calendar representing one year will not serve for the next year. With perennial calendars, the same representation of the year serves for every year. Perpetual calendars, in this context, are computation devices for determining the weekdays of dates in any given year, or for representing a wide range of annual calendars.
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day "tropical" or "solar" year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.
The Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar (HHPC) is a proposal for calendar reform. It is one of many examples of leap week calendars, calendars that maintain synchronization with the solar year by intercalating entire weeks rather than single days. It is a modification of a previous proposal, Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time (CCC&T). With the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar, every calendar date always falls on the same day of the week. A major feature of the calendar system is the abolition of time zones.
A perennial calendar is a calendar that applies to any year, keeping the same dates, weekdays and other features.
The Solar Hijri calendar is the official calendar of Iran. It is a solar calendar and is the one Iranian calendar that is the most similar to the Gregorian calendar, being based on the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It begins on the March equinox as determined by the astronomical calculation for the Iran Standard Time meridian and has years of 365 or 366 days. It is sometimes also called the Shamsi calendar, Khorshidi calendar, or Persian calendar. It is abbreviated as SH, HS, AP, or, sometimes as AHSh, while the lunar Hijri calendar is usually abbreviated as AH.
A computus clock is a clock equipped with a mechanism that automatically calculates and displays, or helps determine, the date of Easter. A computus watch carries out the same function.
