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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.
Short format: dd/mm/yyyy (Day first, month number and year in left-to-right writing direction) in Afar, French and Somali ("d/m/yy" is a common alternative). Gregorian dates follow the same rules but tend to be written in the yyyy/m/d format (Day first, month number, and year in right-to-left writing direction) in Arabic language.
Because the number of days in the tropical year is not a whole number, a solar calendar must have a different number of days in different years. This may be handled, for example, by adding an extra day in leap years. The same applies to months in a lunar calendar and also the number of months in a year in a lunisolar calendar.
In most calendar systems, the date consists of three parts: the (numbered) day of the month, the month, and the (numbered) year. There may also be additional parts, such as the day of the week. Years are usually counted from a particular starting point, usually called the epoch, with era referring to the span of time since that epoch. [b]
Though the numbered month names are often used for the corresponding month number in the Gregorian calendar, it is important to realize that the numbered month names are not interchangeable with the Gregorian months when talking about lunar dates.
A lunisolar calendar was found at Warren Field in Scotland and has been dated to c. 8000 BC, during the Mesolithic period. [2] [3] Some scholars argue for lunar calendars still earlier—Rappenglück in the marks on a c. 17,000 year-old cave painting at Lascaux and Marshack in the marks on a c. 27,000 year-old bone baton—but their findings remain controversial.
The Arabic names of the months of the Gregorian calendar are usually phonetic Arabic pronunciations of the corresponding month names used in European languages. An exception is the Assyrian calendar used in Iraq and the Levant, whose month names are inherited via Classical Arabic from the Babylonian and Hebrew lunisolar calendars and correspond to roughly the same time of year.
The corresponding numbers in the far right hand column on the same line as each component of the date (the hundreds, remaining digits and month) are added, then the day of the month. This total is divided by 7 and the remainder from this division located in the far right hand column. The day of the week is beside it.