The Collaborative International Dictionary
Calendar \Cal"en*dar\, n. [OE. kalender, calender, fr. L. kalendarium an interest or account book (cf. F. calendrier, OF. calendier) fr. L. calendue, kalendae, calends. See Calends.]
An orderly arrangement of the division of time, adapted to the purposes of civil life, as years, months, weeks, and days; also, a register of the year with its divisions; an almanac.
(Eccl.) A tabular statement of the dates of feasts, offices, saints' days, etc., esp. of those which are liable to change yearly according to the varying date of Easter.
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An orderly list or enumeration of persons, things, or events; a schedule; as, a calendar of state papers; a calendar of bills presented in a legislative assembly; a calendar of causes arranged for trial in court; a calendar of a college or an academy.
Note: Shepherds of people had need know the calendars of tempests of state.
--Bacon.Calendar clock, one that shows the days of the week and month.
Calendar month. See under Month.
French Republican calendar. See under Vend['e]miaire.
Gregorian calendar, Julian calendar, Perpetual calendar. See under Gregorian, Julian, and Perpetual.
Gregorian \Gre*go"ri*an\, a. [NL. Gregorianus, fr. Gregorius Gregory, Gr. ?: cf. F. gr['e]gorien.] Pertaining to, or originated by, some person named Gregory, especially one of the popes of that name.
Gregorian calendar, the calendar as reformed by Pope Gregory XIII. in 1582, including the method of adjusting the leap years so as to harmonize the civil year with the solar, and also the regulation of the time of Easter and the movable feasts by means of epochs. See Gregorian year (below).
Gregorian chant (Mus.), plain song, or canto fermo, a kind of unisonous music, according to the eight celebrated church modes, as arranged and prescribed by Pope Gregory I. (called ``the Great'') in the 6th century.
Gregorian modes, the musical scales ordained by Pope Gregory the Great, and named after the ancient Greek scales, as Dorian, Lydian, etc.
Gregorian telescope (Opt.), a form of reflecting telescope, named from Prof. James Gregory, of Edinburgh, who perfected it in 1663. A small concave mirror in the axis of this telescope, having its focus coincident with that of the large reflector, transmits the light received from the latter back through a hole in its center to the eyepiece placed behind it.
Gregorian year, the year as now reckoned according to the Gregorian calendar. Thus, every year, of the current reckoning, which is divisible by 4, except those divisible by 100 and not by 400, has 366 days; all other years have 365 days. See Bissextile, and Note under Style, n., 7.
Wikipedia
The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, is internationally the most widely used civil calendar. It is named for Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in October 1582.
The calendar was a refinement to the Julian calendar amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year. The motivation for the reform was to stop the drift of the calendar with respect to the equinoxes and solstices—particularly the vernal equinox, which set the date for Easter celebrations. Transition to the Gregorian calendar would restore the holiday to the time of the year in which it was celebrated when introduced by the early Church. The reform was adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe. Protestants and Eastern Orthodox countries continued to use the traditional Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian reform after a time, for the sake of convenience in international trade. The last European country to adopt the reform was Greece, in 1923.
The Gregorian reform contained two parts: a reform of the Julian calendar as used prior to Pope Gregory XIII's time and a reform of the lunar cycle used by the Church, with the Julian calendar, to calculate the date of Easter. The reform was a modification of a proposal made by Aloysius Lilius. His proposal included reducing the number of leap years in four centuries from 100 to 97, by making 3 out of 4 centurial years common instead of leap years. Lilius also produced an original and practical scheme for adjusting the epacts of the moon when calculating the annual date of Easter, solving a long-standing obstacle to calendar reform.
The Gregorian reform modified the Julian calendar's scheme of leap years as follows:
Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.
In addition to the change in the mean length of the calendar year from 365.25 days (365 days 6 hours) to 365.2425 days (365 days 5 hours 49 minutes 12 seconds), a reduction of 10 minutes 48 seconds per year, the Gregorian calendar reform also dealt with the accumulated difference between these lengths. The canonical Easter tables were devised at the end of the third century, when the vernal equinox fell either on 20 March or 21 March depending on the year's position in the leap year cycle. As the rule was that the full moon preceding Easter was not to precede the equinox the equinox was fixed at 21 March for computational purposes and the earliest date for Easter was fixed at 22 March. The Gregorian calendar reproduced these conditions by removing ten days.
To unambiguously specify the date, dual dating or Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are sometimes used with dates. Dual dating uses two consecutive years because of differences in the starting date of the year, or includes both the Julian and Gregorian dates. Old Style and New Style (N.S.) indicate either whether the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (N.S.) even though documents written at the time use a different start of year (O.S.), or whether a date conforms to the Julian calendar (O.S.) rather than the Gregorian (N.S.).
The Gregorian calendar continued to use the previous calendar era (year-numbering system), which counts years from the traditional date of the nativity ( Anno Domini), originally calculated in the 6th century by Dionysius Exiguus. This year-numbering system, also known as Dionysian era or Common Era, is the predominant international standard today. __TOC__
Usage examples of "gregorian calendar".
In modern Western society we still make use of a solar calendar which was introduced in Europe in 1582 and is based on the best scientific knowledge then available: the famous Gregorian calendar.
The pastor wondered if the fact that more of us were Catholic than any other religion was the reason that Grantville used the Gregorian calendar.
Just like the modern Gregorian calendar, the Shire Calendar regulated time by adding an extra day every four years.
I could give you the day of the week for any date since we went on the Gregorian calendar.
Perhaps you are unaware that Russia observes the Julian calendar, which is twelve days earlier than your Gregorian calendar of the West.
Two, it made sure that each day's population would not be cheated out of its full quota of days per year because of the different days of the months as set by the Gregorian calendar.
I'd just assumed that it went on indefinitely, much the way our Gregorian calendar does.
The modern Gregorian calendar had been decreed by a papal bull in 1582, and was immediately adopted by Spain, Portugal, France and Italy.
When England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, October 19 became October 30.
The simultaneous presence in both cultures of the religious figure of the fish, the Gregorian calendar, which parallels the stone calendars of the early Americans, the pyramid, which exists in both but in no other primitive society.