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Thirty Days Hath September", or "Thirty Days Has September", [1] is a traditional verse mnemonic used to remember the number of days in the months of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It arose as an oral tradition and exists in many variants. It is currently earliest attested in English, but was and remains common throughout Europe as well. Full:
One form of the mnemonic is done by counting on the knuckles of one's hand to remember the number of days in each month. [1] Knuckles are counted as 31 days, depressions between knuckles as 30 (or 28/29) days. One starts with the little finger knuckle as January, and one finger or depression at a time is counted towards the index finger knuckle ...
A mnemonic for the number of days in each month uses the knuckles (and the dips between them) of two fists, held together, moving right from the left pinky knuckle. The raised knuckles can be seen as the 31-day months, the dips between them as the 30-day-months (and February). The gap between the hands ignored.
That the months alternate in number in this way is not evident at all from the verse, which has all the months mixed up for the spurious reason of rhyme. For that reason, people who work out the "days of the month" by the verse are largely unaware that the months alternate sequentially between 31 and 30 (with some minor exceptions).
A month is a unit of time, used with calendars, that is approximately as long as a natural phase cycle of the Moon; the words month and Moon are cognates.The traditional concept of months arose with the cycle of Moon phases; such lunar months ("lunations") are synodic months and last approximately 29.53 days, making for roughly 12.37 such months in one Earth year.
A perfect month or a rectangular month designates a month whose number of days is divisible by the number of days in a week and whose first day corresponds to the first day of the week. [1] [2] This causes the arrangement of the days of the month to resemble a rectangle.
Indicating the number of stressed syllables in certain lines: AA 4 B 2 CC 4 or AA 4 B 2 CC 4; Some publications use lowercase or have punctuation to separate lines or stanzas, e.g. abba cdcd or a-b-b-a,c-d-c-d. (These variations are not used elsewhere in this article, for clarity.) Notable rhyme schemes and forms that use specific rhyme schemes:
The short months of 29 days were known as "hollow" and the ones with 30 days as "full". Each month was divided into three phases of ten days associated with the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon. The naming of the days was complex. The first day of the month was simply noumenia or new moon, a name used in virtually every Greek ...