Dominical letter

Dominical letters are a method used to determine the day of the week for particular dates.

They are derived from the Roman practice of marking the repeating sequence of eight letters A–H (commencing with A on 1 January) 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 1 January. The dominical letter marked the Sundays. Nowadays they are only used 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, 2017 is A, indicating that all A days are Sunday, and by inference, 1 January 2017 is 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 dominical letter. In the Catholic version, it did, but in the 1662 Anglican version it did not. The Catholic version causes February to have 29 days by doubling the sixth day before 1 March, inclusive, because 24 February in a common year is marked "duplex", thus both halves of the doubled day have a dominical letter of F. The Anglican version adds a day to February that did not exist in common years, 29 February, thus it does not have a dominical letter of its own.

In either case, all other dates have the same dominical letter every year, but the dates of the dominical letters change within a leap year before and after the intercalary day, 24 February or 29 February.

Per Thurston (1909), dominical letters were:

a device adopted from the Romans by... chronologers to aid them in finding the day of the week corresponding to any given date, and indirectly to facilitate the adjustment of the 'Proprium de Tempore' to the 'Proprium Sanctorum' when constructing the ecclesiastical calendar for any year."

Thurston continues that the Christian Church, with its "complicated system of movable and immovable feasts" has long been concerned with the regulation and measurement of time; he states: "To secure uniformity in the observance of feasts and fasts, she began, even in the patristic age, to supply a computus, or system of reckoning, by which the relation of the solar and lunar years might be accommodated and the celebration of Easter determined." He continues, that naturally she "adopted the astronomical methods then available, and these methods and the methodology belonging to them having become traditional, are perpetuated in a measure to this day, even the reform of the calendar, in the prolegomena to the Breviary and Missal."

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