Why January Is Called January, and Why the Year Starts Here

Every year we start again in January. Diaries reset, gyms fill, and people make promises to themselves that may or may not survive until the end of the month. It feels natural, almost inevitable, that the year should begin here. But it was not always so, and the story of how January got its name and its place at the front of the calendar is a long and slightly messy one.

At FlyJanuary.org, we are named after the month of fresh starts, so it seemed only fair to look into where it came from. What follows is a short history, from Roman gods to British parliamentary acts. Ancient history is full of gaps and later retellings, so where the evidence is uncertain or disputed, we say so.

The god with two faces

The English word January comes, via Old French and Latin, from the Roman month name Ianuarius. That name is generally connected with Janus, one of the most distinctively Roman gods.

Janus was the god of doorways, gates, passages and transitions, and by extension of beginnings and endings. He was typically depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions: one towards the past, one towards the future. The Latin word ianua, meaning door, is closely related, and some ancient writers linked the month to doorways directly rather than to the god. Either way, the symbolism is the same: January is the threshold of the year.

Janus had no direct equivalent among the major Greek gods, which makes him unusually Roman. He was invoked at the start of many undertakings, and the doors of his famous shrine in the Roman Forum were said to stand open in times of war and closed in times of peace. Roman writers claimed they were rarely shut.

January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of doorways and beginnings. Looking back and forward at the same time is exactly what the month still asks of us.

The calendar that started in March

Here is the twist: the earliest Roman calendar, as later Roman writers described it, did not include January at all.

According to tradition, Rome’s legendary founder Romulus introduced a calendar of ten months, starting in March and totalling around 304 days. The winter period after December seems simply not to have been assigned to any month. Historians treat this account with caution, since it comes from authors writing centuries later, but traces of it survive in our month names:

Month	Latin root	Meaning	Position in the ten-month calendar
September	septem	seven	7th
October	octo	eight	8th
November	novem	nine	9th
December	decem	ten	10th

That is why December, whose name means “tenth”, is now our twelfth month.

Numa adds January and February

Roman tradition credits the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, with reforming the calendar, traditionally dated to around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Numa is said to have added two months, January and February, bringing the year closer to the lunar cycle at roughly 355 days.

Exactly where those months were placed is debated. Some ancient sources suggest January was put at the start of the year, while others suggest February came last and that the order changed later. Because Numa himself is a semi-legendary figure, it is safest to say that Romans believed this reform happened, rather than that we know the details.

What is better attested is that the Roman calendar of the Republic was hard to manage. To keep it aligned with the seasons, officials periodically inserted an extra month. In practice this was done irregularly, sometimes for political advantage, and by the first century BC the calendar had drifted badly out of step with the seasons.

When the Roman year began in January

For a long time, the Roman year was associated with March. A practical change came in 153 BC, when the consuls, Rome’s chief annual magistrates, began taking office on 1 January. Since Romans often identified years by the names of the consuls, 1 January became the effective start of the civil year. The reasons for the change are discussed by historians, and a military emergency in Spain is commonly cited, though the details are debated.

Julius Caesar fixes the calendar

The big reform came from Julius Caesar. Advised by astronomers, often said to include Sosigenes of Alexandria, Caesar introduced a new solar calendar that took effect in 45 BC. It had 365 days in a normal year and an extra day every fourth year, which closely matched the solar year.

To bring the calendar back into line with the seasons, the transition year of 46 BC was stretched to roughly 445 days, and it has sometimes been called the “year of confusion”. The new Julian calendar kept 1 January as the start of the year.

The Julian calendar was very good for its time but not perfect. It ran slightly long, by about 11 minutes a year, which added up to roughly one day every 128 years. That small error would matter a great deal later on.

The medieval wobble

You might expect 1 January to have remained New Year from then on. It did not. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Christian Europe used several different start dates for the year, varying by place and period. Common choices included:

• 25 December, Christmas Day.
• 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, also known as Lady Day.
• Easter, which moved every year and made dating awkward.

At the same time, 1 January often continued to be celebrated popularly as New Year’s Day, even where the legal or official year started elsewhere. So for centuries, many Europeans effectively lived with two New Years.

The Gregorian reform and Britain’s late switch

By the sixteenth century, the small Julian error had pushed the calendar about ten days out of line with the seasons, which affected the calculation of Easter. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the reformed Gregorian calendar, which dropped ten days and adjusted the leap year rule so that most century years are not leap years.

Catholic countries adopted it fairly quickly. Protestant and Orthodox countries took longer. Many European states had already moved the start of their year to 1 January by then, and the Gregorian calendar is often associated with that date, though the two changes were not always made together.

Britain followed its own path:

1. 1600: Scotland moved the start of the year to 1 January.
2. 1750: Parliament passed the Calendar (New Style) Act.
3. 1752: England, Wales and the British colonies began the year on 1 January for the first time, and adopted the Gregorian calendar. To catch up, 2 September 1752 was followed directly by 14 September.

An echo of the old system is often said to survive in the UK tax year, which begins on 6 April. The usual explanation links it to the old Lady Day year start, adjusted for the lost days, though the exact chain of adjustments is a little more complicated.

Where New Year resolutions come from

Making promises at the start of the year is old, though the precise history is patchy.

The ancient Babylonians are often said to have made promises to their gods during their New Year festival, such as repaying debts or returning borrowed items. That festival was held in spring rather than January, and the details come to us through fragmentary sources.

The Romans marked 1 January with offerings to Janus, good wishes and small gifts intended to bring luck for the coming year. Some historians suggest this included promises of good conduct, though it is hard to know how widespread that was.

In the Christian tradition, some churches developed services of reflection and renewal around the turn of the year. The Methodist Covenant Service, associated with John Wesley in the eighteenth century, is a well-known example and is still often held around New Year.

The secular habit of personal resolutions, about self-improvement rather than religious duty, seems to have become common in the English-speaking world over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the phrase “New Year resolution” begins to appear in print. Today the tradition is everywhere, along with the jokes about how quickly resolutions are abandoned.

If you want yours to fare better than average, our guide to new year habits that last focuses on the small, repeatable changes that tend to stick. And if one of your goals is reading more history like this, see how to read more books.

Why it still matters

The story of January is really a story of people trying to impose order on time: matching months to moons, the year to the sun and the calendar to politics, religion and practicality. Janus, looking both ways, turns out to be a fitting symbol for all of it.

For a reliable overview of Roman religion and calendar history, Encyclopaedia Britannica is a good starting point. You can find more curious corners of everyday life in our general interest section.

Frequently asked questions

Who was January named after?

January is generally traced to the Latin Ianuarius, the month associated with Janus, the Roman god of doorways, gates, transitions and beginnings. Janus was often shown with two faces, one looking back and one looking forward, which suits a month that starts the year.

When did 1 January become New Year in Britain?

Scotland moved the start of its year to 1 January in 1600. England, Wales and the British colonies kept 25 March as the legal start of the year until the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 made 1 January the start of the year from 1752.

Did the Romans make New Year resolutions?

Not in the modern sense, as far as we know. Romans marked 1 January with offerings, good wishes and gifts linked to good fortune for the year, and some historians suggest people made promises to the gods. The phrase New Year resolution appears in English much later.

Share this guide:FacebookXPinterestLinkedIn