CALENDS

Calends

The calends were the first days of each month of the Roman calendar. The Romans assigned these calends to the first day of the month, signifying the start of the new moon cycle. On that day, the pontiffs would announce at the Curia Calabra the rest days for the upcoming month and the debtors had to pay off their debts that were inscribed in the kalendaria, a sort of accounts book. The date was measured forward to upcoming days such as the calends, nones or ides. Thus, while modern calendars count the number of days after the first of each month, III. Kal. Ian. would be December 30th, three days before the first of January. To ...

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calends

Noun

  1. the first day of a month.
    February contained only 28 days: it had four nones like January and eight ides like all the other months; its ides were upon the 13th day of the month; and consequently after the ides there would remain only 15 days in the month: the first of these, by an inclusive reckoning, was called the 16th of (or before) the calends of March. – T. Rutherford, A System of Natural Philosophy
  2. the first day of a season.
    Whoever shall sell sheep, let him be answerable for three diseases (scab and rot and red water) until they receive their fill three times of the new grass in spring, if after the calends of winter he sells them. — Arthur Wade-Evans, Welsh Medieval Law


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: calends
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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