Why doe Febuary only have 28 days and 29 in a leap year?

Wow. Many answerers not answering the complete question.

I believe that at one point the length of the months in the roman calendar went 31,30,31,30,31,30 etc. Then people started messing with it (someone said Augustus Caesar which makes sense), and stole days from February, which made it 28 days.

Later, when the gregorian calendar came about (which was when the year 0 as Jesus's birth was implemented) they made the change of adding an extra day every 4 years, as the earth's orbit around the sun is not exactly 365 days, and they didn't want the seasons to creep into different months. The obvious month to be given the extra day was Feb, as it was shorter than the rest.

None of the answers are quite right, on certain details.

The year is not an integral number of days long, so we must fiddle with the calendar somehow, or have the seasons drift through the year. The Islamic calender is synchronized with the Moon, is 354 days long, and, yes, the seasons drift.

The Romans thought February was an unlucky month, so they made it shorter. The original Roman calendar was diffeerent from ours, but reached its final form with the Julian calender, which had a leap year every four years, for an average year length of 365.25 days.

This is a little too long; the actual year is a few minutes shorter than that, so the leap year pattern was refined in the 1500s to the present Gregorian calendar. This was not adopted immediately by everybody; the British waited until 1752, and the Eastern Orthodox church uses the Julian calender to this day.

A common year has 365 days and a leap year 366 days, with the extra, or intercalary, day designated as February 29. A leap year occurs every four years to help synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, or the length of time it takes the earth to complete its orbit about the sun, which is about 365¼ days.

The length of the solar year, however, is slightly less than 365¼ days—by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy, the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.

In other words, a century year cannot be a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. Thus 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.

and leap year has nothing to do with romans...its the Gregorians...

We have this because a year is 365 1/4 days so every 4 years this adds up to 1 day. We need to use this day or else the years and days will be all wrong. This is why we add it on to February every 4 years. Hope I could help xx

Well a year isn't really 365 days long, it is 365 and a quarter.

So every four years the quaters add up to make a full extra day which is the extra day in a leap year.

Hi. Augustus Caesar took a day from February so that his month, August, would not have only 30 days when Julius Caesar's month, July, had 31.

Technically you would celebrate it on March 1st. Because if February 29th doesn't exist then the next day after February 28th would be March 1st. If you picked February 28th to celebrate your birthday you would be celebrating one day early! If it were up to me I would celebrate it on both days though!!!!!!!!!!!!

in a year (time to orbit sun) there are 365 1/4 days, so we add it up every 4 years to get an extra day. this may have been a roman invention.

a day is nearly over 24 hours, so every 4 years all the extra seconds add up to one day, so leap day is even put in Febuary because it has the least days out of all other months.

The Romans didn't like February very much, so they kept it short.