Ask anyone how many days there are in a year and the answer will automatically be 365. Well, that is the correct answer most of the time, but not all the time.

Why? Simply because 2024 has the honour of being a leap year, meaning it has one extra day. It falls on Feb 29, which of course causes complications for those born on this day.

But why is there a leap year to begin with?

The average year has 365 days, marking how long the Earth takes to make a complete orbit around the Sun. Except… that is not exactly correct.

In truth, the total time it takes for the planet to complete its orbit is roughly 365.25 days, which doesn’t seem like that much of a difference from 365.

However, ignoring those six hours of a day is not ideal either, since the lost minutes will add up and mess with everyone’s sense of time.

If left unobserved for centuries, people in the northern hemisphere will experience winter in the middle of the year rather than at the end!

This was a predicament that needed solving, and who better to solve it than… Julius Caesar himself? Yes, the man after whom July is named is responsible for this matter of time.

Back in the day, the ancient Romans had a calendar with 355 days and to ensure festivals actually took place in the correct seasons, every second year had a 22- or 23-day month.

Sounds complicated? Caesar thought so too and ordered his personal astronomer, Sosigenes, to do the math.

And into the world was borne the 365-day calendar, with every four years seeing the addition of Feb 29 into what was later called the Julian calendar.

The system would have worked perfectly if one solar year really did amount to 365.25 days, but the accurate number of days is actually slightly lesser, at roughly 365.242.

That discrepancy, again, added up to roughly 10 days. So, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII suggested a new calendar and coined the term “leap year”.

The major rule for the Gregorian calendar states that leap years are to take place in years that can be divided by four.

If it was a century year, like say, 2000 or 2100, a leap year had to be divisible by 400 instead. Hence, 1600 and 2000 were leap years but not 1700 or 1900.

Problem solved? Well, the solar year actually is 26 seconds shorter than the modern-day Gregorian calendar, but let some science whizz of the future fix that.

As to be expected of “special” days, cultures and communities around the globe have their own interpretations on leap years.

In Greece, for example, some people believe that marrying in a leap year increases the likelihood of that relationship falling apart.

The Irish, on the other hand, have a different view of the matter, with Bachelor’s Day being celebrated on Feb 29. On this day, women propose marriage to their male partners. This tradition has spread far beyond the Emerald Isle though.

In Scotland, for example, there is a claim that in 1288, Queen Margaret of Scotland decreed that any man turning down a Leap Day proposal would be fined.

Across the sea, in Denmark, men guilty of doing that had to give the rejected woman 12 pairs of gloves as compensation. Male Icelanders, on the other hand, are expected to give fabric instead.

In regard to birthdays, in Scotland, anyone born on Feb 29 was said to be cursed with bad luck, and dubbed “leaplings”.

In parts of Europe, leap years are seen as a year of poor luck; in America, however, “leaplings” are often viewed in a more positive light.

The northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia calls leap years “whale years”, with tradition stating that whales give birth only during these years.

And in France, leap years are observed with some press humour, with the world’s least published newspaper, “La Bougie du Sapeur” being published only on leap days.

Across the Channel, some London bars observe Feb 29 with the Leap Year cocktail, created to celebrate the rare occasion with some drunken merriness.