September
What gives?
What does September mean?
According to the original Roman republican calendar, September was the seventh month of the year rather than the ninth. The Roman calendar was only 10 months long and included the following months: Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December.
The last six months were assigned names according to their ordinal numbers. Quintilis is the fifth month, Sextilis is the sixth month, and so on. September, as you can see, was the seventh month.
September may have gone from being seventh to ninth in the calendar, but will its number of days ever change? Not if this poem has anything to say about it.
When did the calendar change?
It wasn’t until 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar (named after Caesar, himself), that the year grew to include two more months, January and February. Quintilis and Sextilis were later renamed July and August in honor of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, but despite repeated attempts to change them, the names for September, October, November, and December not only stuck, but spread to other languages as well.
The strangeness of calling the ninth month “Seventh Month” didn’t seem to bother Old English speakers. September replaced the Old English forms Hāligmōnað and Hærfestmōnað, which mean “harvest month” in modern English.