Leap year is a strange name for something that only happens every four years.
People, especially young people, tend to not know what a leap year is. Well, there is a lot that goes into it. We can look at it from two ways. A scientific way of thinking or looking back on the past and figuring it out.
For those that want to see it from the scientific standpoint, the Earth has 365 days which is a year and most if not everyone knows this and we are taught this in school from an early age. But this isn’t entirely true, the Earth has a rounded number of days that’s where the 365 comes from but the actual number is 365.242190 days which is an odd thing to look at and understand.
Having the calendar stay like this wouldn’t be good on how we see our seasons. They will drift and though it won’t affect the people right now in about 700 years the summers we know in love being in June and July will somehow be in December and January. So that’s why adding an extra day every four years to our calendars is important.
Now if we look at it from how people say it in the past, it goes back pretty far all the way back to the bronze age of time. There were many different calendars being used back then. So the king of that time Julius Caesar came up with his own calendar, the Julian calendar, with the astrologers back then and with the resources they had.
They somehow came up with the conclusion that there are 365.25 days very close but just no there with the one answer we have today being an extra day. So that day was added to February and it’s been adjusted since then. Something weird does come from a leap year though, if you have a birthday on this strange day then you would have to opt for it being on March 1 on any other year.
Essentially having your whole day you were born being taken from you which I think some find interesting and or funny. So now you have more knowledge on what we call a leap year, so go outside and play leapfrog.