Thursday, March 01, 2012

History of Leap Year

In case you were wondering who invented Leap Year and why ... we thought we would share a little trivia with you. Julius Caesar introduced Leap Years in the Roman empire over 2000 years ago, but the Julian calendar had only one rule: any year evenly divisible by 4 would be a leap year. This lead to way too many leap years, but didn't get corrected until the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar more than 1500 years later.

However, the Gregorian calendar has only 365 days in a year, so if we didn't add a day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours off our calendar every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days! Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth's revolutions around the sun. It takes the Earth approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds (a tropical year) – to circle once around the Sun.

Did you know there are also some interesting traditions for Leap Years. In Britain and Ireland, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only on leap years. In some places the tradition was tightened to restricting female proposals to the modern leap year day, February 29. In Greece, marriage in a leap year is considered unlucky. One in five engaged couples in Greece will plan to avoid getting married in a leap year.

What are your chances of being born on leap day? About 1 in 1,500. A person born on February 29 may be called a "leapling" or a "leaper". In common years they usually celebrate their birthdays on February 28 or March 1. In some situations, March 1 is used as the birthday in a non-leap year since it is the day following February 28. Today, we celebrate Leap Day and the birthdays of "Leapers".