The month is a unit of time and is a multiple of an SI base unit with the symbol mo.
There are 100s of definitions of a month that have been established, reviewed and adopted over the course of history but the most common around the world today are the months in the Julian and Gregorian calendars.
There are 12 months in the Julian and Gregorian year; averaging 30.4368 days in each. They are labelled January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.
There is a famous rhyme to help remember how many days are in each month that goes “Thirty days has September, April, June and November – all the rest have thirty-one. Except February which has 28 or 29 in a leap year.”
Many cultures use the moon’s cycle (the lunar cycle) to define which month they are in.
The tropical year is a unit of time that is a multiple of an SI unit. We have used the symbol at.
The average tropical year up to the year 2000 was 365.2422 days of 86400 seconds.
The phrase “tropical” comes from the Greek for “turn”; tropikos. Following this, and where the “turn” referred to is the same as that defining the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer (the extreme latitudes North and South where the sun can still appear directly overhead or perpendicular to the Earth’s surface); a tropical year is known as the time it takes the sun to complete a full cycle of seasons and return to the same relative position to the observer on Earth.
In 1627, Johannes Kepler used the findings of Tycho Brahe and Waltherus (the Rudolphine Tables) to establish the mean tropical year as 365 solar days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds.