What's with the names of our months?
Doesn't OCTOBER come from OCTO, the Latin word for 8?
The early Roman calendar had 10 months named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. In that calendar, the last 6 months used the recognized numerical prefixes.
So the meaning of October comes from the Latin word Octo meaning eight. The old Roman calendar started in March, so October was the eighth month. When the Roman senate changed the calendar in 153 BCE, the new year started in January, and October became the tenth month.
This calendar had a major flaw in that the days in all the months didn’t add up to a full year. A couple of centuries later, January and February were added to the calendar to bring the calendar closer to 365 days.
So now the prefixes don’t match the numerical order.
So, what happened to Quintilis and Sextilis? In 44BC Quintilis was renamed to July to honour Julius Caesar. Later in 8BC Sextilis was renamed to August to honour Augustus Caesar.
What happened with the other names? Over the centuries, the Roman calendar was replaced with the Julian calendar, and then finally (for now) the Gregorian calendar. The number of days in each month and the names of the months were tweaked to get to where we are today.
