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It was really ever 'invented'. There actually aren't 365 days in a year. There are 365 and one fourth. That's why every four years an extra day is added. The extra fourth has to go somewhere. Hope this helped.

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12y ago
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14y ago

It has been obvious since before Roman times that the Earth's orbit around the Sun does not take a precisely even number of days, and that any calendar that wanted to keep in synchronization with the seasons would need some way of accounting for that. Leap years (or in some cultures, leap MONTHS) are the way of adjusting the calendar to stay in synch with the seasons.

The Roman "Julian" calendar (devised by Julius Caesar, or under his direction) was the first widely used calendar that tried to adjust the calendar to the year. Every fourth year was a leap" year. As an "Imperial" calendar, everybody who owed allegiance to Rome used it, but by the early 1500's, the Julian calendar was 10 days out of whack with the seasons, and this was affecting the Catholic Church's festivals; Easter was coming too late! So monks under the direction of Pope Gregory devised a revision of the Julian calendar, removing three leap days every 400 years. It took until the mid-1700s before the English government adopted it, but the Gregorian calendar is the one we still use today.

The Gregorian calendar will remain within one day of being accurate for several millennia; we don't have to worry about this for a LONG time to come.

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13y ago

The idea of an intercalendary day, to keep the calendar in synch with the seasons, dates back to the Romans. The Julian calendar, devised by the order of Julius Caesar, is 2000 years old, but didn't quite compensate completely for the unevenness of the day as compared to the year. So by the year 1500 or so, the holidays were 11 days out of sync with the seasons.

Our current civil calendar is the "Gregorian" calendar, devised by order of Pope Gregory. This calendar is "only" 500 years old or so.

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12y ago

It was help people

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Q: When was the leap year invented?
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