Leap year
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For other uses, see Leap year (disambiguation).
A leap year (or intercalary or bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day
(or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a...
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Leap year
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Leap year (disambiguation).
A leap year (or intercalary or bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day
(or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a month) in order to keep the calendar year
synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year.
[1] Because seasons and
astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, a calendar that had the
same number of days in each year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was
supposed to track.
By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month
into the year, the drift can be corrected.
A year that is not a leap year is called a common
year.
For example, in the Gregorian calendar (a common solar calendar), February in a leap
year has 29 days instead of the usual 28, so the year lasts 366 days instead of the usual
365.
Similarly, in the Hebrew calendar (a lunisolar calendar), a 13th lunar month
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