A calendar reform is any significant revision of a calendar system. The term sometimes is used instead for a proposal to switch to a different calendar.
Most calendars have several rules which could be altered by reform:
- If and how days are grouped into subdivisions such as months and weeks, and days outside those subdivisions, if any.
- Which years are leap years and common years and how they differ.
- Numbering of years, selection of the epoch, and the issue of year zero.
- Start of the year (such as Southern solstice, January 1, March 1, Northward equinox, Easter).
- If a week is retained, the start, length, and names of its days.
- Start of the day (midnight, sunrise, noon, or sunset).
- If months are retained, number, lengths, and names of months,
- Special days and periods (such as leap day or intercalary day).
- Alignment with social cycles.
- Alignment with astronomic cycles.
- Alignment with biological cycles.
- Literal notation of dates.
Read more about Calendar Reform: Historical Reforms, Proposals
Famous quotes containing the words calendar and/or reform:
“To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.”
—Clifton Fadiman (b. 1904)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)