The months September, October, November, and December derive from Latin words that mean “seven,” “eight,” “nine,” and “ten” respectively. So why are they applied to the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months of the year? The answer lies in the messy history of marking the year, described in detail in David Duncan’s book, Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why the Month Names Don’t Match Their Order”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Kaya from Wisconsin, from Brookfield.
Hi, Kaya. Welcome to the show.
Hello.
What’s up?
I’ve always been wondering why, when they named months, they named September the ninth month and not the seventh month, and like October the tenth month and not the eighth month.
That’s a really good question.
Yeah. Are you a student of Latin?
No.
Just knowing that set means seven and oct is eight and DEC usually stands for 10. And so I was just wondering why the months were named as they were.
Yeah, it’s a great question. And it has to do with the very messy and very long history of trying to make sense of time and trying to figure out how to divide the calendar up, divide up the year.
Those numbered months are reflected in an early Roman calendar that was only 304 days and had only 10 months. And yeah, and it started with Martius, like our March, which was named for the Roman god of war. Same root as Mars, you know, the planet Mars.
And it went Martius, Aprilus, Maius, Junius. And then after that, it started numbering the months. So the fifth month was quintilis, and the sixth month was sextilis. And then you go on to September, October, November, and December. And so they’re all numbers that come directly from Latin.
And then later on, the month quintilis got changed to Julius in honor of Julius Caesar. And August has its roots in Caesar Augustus. And there were 12 months in the year after that.
Well, so they added January and February, right, at some point. And those were tacked on to begin. But the beginning of the year wasn’t January, right?
Right.
It was March. Until what, the Gregorian calendar came about?
It was, yeah, it was a while, yeah.
Well, that makes sense, starting the year with March.
Yeah. You know, and then they, yeah, that makes sense then. And eventually that calendar got adopted in the British Isles. Before that, they were using Anglo-Saxon terms for months, which are kind of cool.
The month of February was Solmanath, which means mud month. And May was Thrimilcha, which basically is the month of three milkings, because it was the time of year when there were so many flowers and the cows were eating so much that you could milk your cow three times a day.
So your observation about the hidden numbers in the months was a good one.
Thank you.
Yeah, there you go. That really helped.
There’s a good book on this by a classmate of mine, David Duncan. It’s called Calendar, and the subtitle is Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. So it really was an epic struggle. It’s varied from time to time over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. So you might check that one out.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, well, thank you so much for calling.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Bye-bye.
You’re welcome.
So, like, what’s astonishing to me is that the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, wasn’t instituted in the English-speaking world until 1752.
That’s late.
That’s really late.
Right? And so anytime you look at older dates and older periodicals, books, what have you, you’ve got to wonder how they got that date and what it actually means. If they say, oh, we celebrated the new year, do they mean March 25th or do they mean January 1st?
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
What a challenge. I can’t figure out how they ever figured it out. I assume it’s kind of like languages now, right? Just a great deal of translation. Maybe you carried something in your wallet that had like a little translation key or it’s like metric to imperial where everything was cups to ounces and so forth.
