The Julian calendar introduced the leap day instead, and maintained it in February as originally, and introduced it every 4 years (except years dividable by 100).

This is also around the same time that July and August were named to their current names (named after Caesar and Augustus). Before that, they had had names equal to fifth and sixth month, respectively, like September comes from seventh.

No idea if that's true, but sounds appropriate for the ego of an emperor.

Now, do i google, duckduckgo, or bing, what those months were called?

Fifth collumism? Sexism?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#Name

History is not my field, I am probably making multiple mistakes and oversimplifying, but I don't see something in that link that disproves what I said. Today, we often refer to Augustus as Augustus Caesar or Caesar Augustus (less frequently, Emperor Augustus). I also think it's interesting to point out Julius's first name in light of the previous discussion, as that's where the month name comes from.

Originally February had 30 days, along with all the other months. (The 5 or 6 remaining days at various times were either extra days which didn't belong to a month or were omitted until there was a month's worth of them to catch up on.)

February got shorter because (being the last month of the year) it had days removed in order to add them to other months -- what was originally February 30th (the end of the year) became February 23rd (the end of the year, after which the leap day is inserted).

The reddit thread is funny but it also forget than there is not only one calendar in the actual world... Long time ago, i have meet an indian who was never able to explain to me witch days he was forbidden to eat meat (he was not a strict vegetarian), or even food at all. It was probably a mix of one of the indian calendars, horoscope and religion.

There is actually no hard evidence that the Romans ever started their calendar in March instead of January. The earliest contemporaneous use of the calendar relies on January 1 as the start of the year, short February, and with intercalation happening after (or maybe within) February.

The primary evidence we use to indicate that the start of the year shifted is... the apparently wrong month names. Some writers did describe a calendar that starts at March and ends in December, with winter basically having no proper calendar--but these are writers describing how their calendar worked several centuries ago, attributing it to mythological figures, and the explanation strikes me as very heavily a "just so" explanation.

If you want my hypothesis, the Roman civil year never started in March. But March would have had some amount of primacy, as it indicates the start of the planting year. Shenanigans in the calendar would have occurred in February to ensure that the equinox is properly timed to happen in March. But the civil year would have started closer to the beginning of winter for other reasons (perhaps taxation? but finding this level of granularity of information on Roman taxation is difficult).

In this hypothesis, the month names were not incorrect because they were never intended to count from the beginning of the year. Note that the first 6 months of the civil year have names, while the last 6 are merely numbered. It makes no sense to me that you'd make up special names for the first 4 and the last 2 months of the year, while skipping everything in the middle.

And they always are end of June or December in UTC time, so locally they can happen on the first of January or first or July.