Leap year

A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or a bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day (or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have the same number of days in each year drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track. By inserting (also called intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year that is not a leap year is called a common year.

For example, in the Gregorian calendar, each leap year has 366 days instead of the usual 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. Similarly, in the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, Adar Aleph, a 13th lunar month, is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its common years to keep its calendar year from drifting through the seasons.

Leap year (disambiguation)

A leap year is a year with an extra day. Leap year may also refer to:

See also

Leap Year (2010 film)

Leap Year is a 2010 American romantic comedy film directed by Anand Tucker, and starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. The film is about a woman who heads to Ireland to ask her boyfriend to accept her wedding proposal on leap day, when tradition supposedly holds that men cannot refuse a woman's proposal for marriage. Her plans are interrupted by a series of increasingly unlikely events and are further complicated when she hires a handsome innkeeper to take her to her boyfriend in Dublin. The film premiered in New York City on January 6, 2010.

Plot

Frustrated that her boyfriend of four years, Jeremy, still has not proposed to her, Anna Brady travels from Boston to Dublin, Ireland to propose to him on February 29, leap day, while he is there at an international cardiologists' conference. According to Irish tradition, a man who is proposed to on leap day must accept the proposal. During the flight, a storm diverts the plane to Cardiff in Wales. Anna hires a boat to take her to Cork, but the severity of the storm forces her to be put ashore on the Dingle Peninsula. She enlists the help of a surly Irish innkeeper, Declan O'Callaghan, to taxi her across the country to Dublin to pull off the proposal in time. Meanwhile, her clumsiness in her room at the inn accidentally causes a power failure to the local village but also opens up the plot of Declans backstory and introduces the idea of a lost love from the picture that Anna finds in the armoire, causing distress from Declan and making it become more intriguing. This causes Anna to later bring up his past relationships as insult.