Leap Year
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.
Because seasons and...
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Leap Year
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.
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 is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its
common years to keep its calendar year from dri
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