How to Read A Calendar

A calendar is a chart that is used to primarily track the days. It's safe to assume that everybody in the civilized world is using a calendar to pinpoint exact dates.

When we talk about calendar, most of the people perhaps you and me, are using a Gregorian calendar. It is a solar calendar system which means that it is based on the rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun.

Thoughout our discussion about reading a calendar, we'll mention tidbits of information related to astronomy so we can get facts about our widely-used calendar system.

Calendar

This is an example of a calendar, this is always updated so it always displays the current calendar year, month and day.

🤔 Calendar and It's Parts

Let's start by determining the layout and parts of a calendar. When all the parts are known, reading a calendar is really easy.

📅 Year and Month

The year in the calendar is usually displayed at the topmost part of it. On today's calendar example below, it is the one with blue color text beside the current month.

The current year is 2025.

The current month is April.

The month and year is usually in one line in the heading of the calendar. It is much bigger that the rest of the texts so it can be recognized right away.

A year is equal to one revolution of the Earth around the Sun. One revolution is equal to 365.25 days, although some just say it is 365 days.

There are 12 months that makes up a year. I'm just going to enumerate them all here from the start to end month and months in between.

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

📅 Days of the Week

In most common calendar layouts, the days of the week are located above the set of days. It serves as a heading to a table of the number of days.

In our example calendar, they are marked by green color text abbreviated in a 3-letter format.

These are the days of the week:

Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

There are 7 days that makes up 1 week. A calendar week starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday. On the other hand, most countries starts their week on Monday and ends on Sunday.

🗓️ Days

The days in the calendar are the numbers you can see in a table format. It ranges from 1 to 28, 1 to 29/30/31.

In our example calendar, there are 30 days this month of April in the current year of 2025.

The calendar layout for displaying the days (1 ... 30) and the days of the week (Sunday ... Monday) are in a table format. Where the days of the week serves as a heading of every column, and the days as table entries that is enumerated by row.

The number of days every month varies. Here are the days count on each month:

Month Name	No. of Days
January	31 days
February	28 or 29 days
March	31 days
April	30 days
May	31 days
June	30 days
July	31 days
August	31 days
September	30 days
October	31 days
November	30 days
December	31 days

🧐 Reading a Calendar

After learning the parts of a calendar, reading a calendar is like a breeze. This is given that you are already familiar with date format. If not, you can check out Date Format Patterns.

To make a clear direction for us on what date we want to set as an example, let's try to read a calendar for today's date:

April 1, 2025

Step 1
The first thing we have to do is to make sure that we are looking at the right calendar year. That means that whether you are looking at a paper calendar or a digital one, make sure that it is the right year which is, using our example, it should be 2025.
Step 2
Then, flip your calendar to April because we are dealing with that month based on our example.
Step 3
Then, on the table of days, let's find the current day which is 1.
Step 4
Finally, if you want to know what day of the week is today's date, look above the heading of the column where today's day falls. It is Tuesday.

That's the step by step process in locating a date and reading it using a calendar. So, for today's date, hopefully you can located and read it which is
Tuesday, April 1, 2025.