Dominical letters or Sunday letters are a method used to determine the day of the week for particular dates. When using this method, each year is assigned a letter (or pair of letters for leap years) depending on which day of the week the year starts. The Dominical letter for the current year 2024 is GF.
Dominical letters are derived from the Roman practice of marking the repeating sequence of eight letters A–H (commencing with A on January 1) on stone calendars to indicate each day's position in the eight-day market week (nundinae). The word is derived from the number nine due to their practice of inclusive counting. After the introduction of Christianity a similar sequence of seven letters A–G was added alongside, again commencing with January 1. The dominical letter marks the Sundays. Nowadays they are used primarily as part of the computus, which is the method of calculating the date of Easter.
A common year is assigned a single dominical letter, indicating which lettered days are Sundays in that particular year (hence the name, from Latin dominica for Sunday). Thus, 2025 will be E, indicating that all E days will be Sunday, and by inference, January 5, 2025, will be a Sunday. Leap years are given two letters, the first valid for January 1 – February 28 (or February 24, see below), the second for the remainder of the year.
In leap years, the leap day may or may not have a letter. In the Catholic version it does, but in the 1662 and subsequent Anglican versions it does not. The Catholic version causes February to have 29 days by doubling the sixth day before March 1, inclusive, thus both halves of the doubled day have a dominical letter of F.[1][2][3] The Anglican version adds a day to February that did not exist in common years, February 29, thus it does not have a dominical letter of its own.[4][5] After the 1662 reform there was correspondence between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the printer of the Book of Common Prayer, in which it was explained that the feast day of St Matthias now fell on February 24 every year.
In either case, all other dates have the same dominical letter every year, but the days of the dominical letters change within a leap year before and after the intercalary day, February 24 or February 29.
^Archer 1941, p. 5.
^Blackburn & Holford-Strevens 1999, p. 829.
^Calendarium Archived February 15, 2005, at the Wayback Machine (Calendar attached to the papal bull "Inter gravissimas").
^"Anno vicesimo quarto Georgii II. c. 23" (1751), The Statutes at Large, from Magna Charta to the end of the Eleventh Parliament of Great Britain, Anno 1761, ed. Danby Pickering, p. 194.
year is assigned a letter (or pair of letters for leap years) depending on which day of the week the year starts. The Dominicalletter for the current year...
begins on Thursday, 1 January, and ends on Thursday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is D. The most recent year of such kind was 2015 and the next...
that begins on Monday, 1 January, and ends on Tuesday, 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are GF. The current year, 2024, is a leap year starting...
The letter E for example, indicates that the first Sunday will be on 5 January. Leap years have two dominical letters because the dominicalletter changes...
begins on Wednesday, 1 January, and ends on Wednesday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is E. The most recent year of such kind was 2014 and the next...
begins on Sunday, 1 January, and ends on Sunday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is A. The most recent year of such kind was 2023 and the next...
begins on Saturday, 1 January, and ends on Saturday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is B. The most recent year of such kind was 2022 and the next...
400 is 100 (dominicalletter C), Wednesday if the remainder is 200 (dominicalletter E), and Monday if the remainder is 300 (dominicalletter G). This means...
begins on Tuesday, 1 January, and ends on Tuesday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is F. The most recent year of such kind was 2019 and the next...
begins on Monday, 1 January, and ends on Monday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is G. The most recent year of such kind was 2018 and the next...
begins on Friday, 1 January, and ends on Friday, 31 December. Its dominicalletter hence is C. The most recent year of such kind was 2021 and the next...
configurations can be referenced by a dominicalletter, but as 29 February has no letter allocated to it, a leap year has two dominical letters, one for January and...
that begins on Sunday, 1 January, and ends on Monday, 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are AG. The most recent year of such kind was 2012 and the...
begins on Tuesday, 1 January, and ends on Wednesday, 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are FE. The most recent year of such kind was 2008 and the...
that begins on Saturday, 1 January, and ends on Sunday, 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are BA. The most recent year of such kind was 2000 and the...
that begins on Friday 1 January and ends on Saturday 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are CB. The most recent year of such kind was 2016 and the...
that begins on Thursday 1 January, and ends on Friday 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are DC. The most recent year of such kind was 2004 and the...
parody-based wiki Toyota Carina ED, a C-segment hardtop saloon car Dominicalletter ED for a leap year starting on Wednesday Expiration date (expiry date)...
that begins on Wednesday 1 January and ends on Thursday 31 December. Its dominical letters hence are ED. The most recent year of such kind was 2020 and the...
leader of the Black Panther Party, known as Field Marshal DC DC, a dominicalletter indicating a leap year starting on Thursday Christian Doctrine Fathers...
Sunday letter or Sunday Letter may refer to: Carta dominica or Sunday Letter, an apocryphal letter about Sunday observance Dominicalletter, a means of...
Dominical may refer to: Dominical, Puntarenas, Costa Rica Dominical, Chiriquí, Panama DominicalletterDominical saying This disambiguation page lists...
week), the epact (the age of the Moon in days on a certain date), the dominicalletter (used to determine the day of the week for particular dates) and the...
intention Good Friday, a Christian holiday Godfather, a male godparent Dominicalletter GF, for a leap year starting on Monday Good fight, what is generally...
its golden number, and its dominicalletter, which tells us which days are Sundays (more precisely, the dominicalletter for the part of the year after...
calendar year. The months with a Friday the 13th are determined by the Dominicalletter (G, F, GF, etc.) of the year. Years which begin on the same day of...
until the sixteenth century. Thereafter it was restricted to being a dominicalletter in the Paschal tables. The seventeenth-century usage of ⟨ѫ⟩ and ⟨ѧ⟩...
the following equivalent definitions: any year starting on Thursday (dominicalletter D or DC) and any leap year starting on Wednesday (ED) any year ending...