Enter a date of birth to see the weekday, the “Monday’s child” line that goes with it, the weekday of each coming birthday, and when the birthday next falls on the same day again.
The most common version, as it is usually printed today:
Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.
“Far to go” is usually read as going far in life, and “full of woe” as full of feeling. “Gay” meant cheerful when the rhyme was written. Wednesday children who would rather not be woeful can point out that older versions gave that line to Friday.
A year of 365 days is 52 weeks and one day, so a birthday moves on by one weekday each year: a Monday birthday is a Tuesday the next year. A leap day in between pushes it on by two. That is why a birthday skips a weekday every four years or so, and why the same weekday comes back after 5, 6 or 11 years rather than every 7.
The pattern repeats every 28 years, as long as no century year that isn’t a leap year (like 2100) falls in between. So someone’s 28th birthday falls on the same weekday they were born on, and so does their 56th.
The weekday someone was born on is a small fact almost nobody knows about themselves, which makes it a good opening line. The button under the result opens the card maker with a birthday message built around their line of the rhyme. If the coming birthday is on a weekend (marked in the list), that is worth a mention too.
The age calculator gives the exact age in years, months and days, and the star sign. The birthstone finder adds the stone, the birth flowers and the Chinese zodiac animal, and the golden birthday calculator finds the one birthday where the age matches the date.
It counts calendar days from a date whose weekday is known, through every leap year in between, using the Gregorian calendar the world uses today. Any date from the year 1 onwards gives an answer, though for dates before your country switched to the Gregorian calendar (1752 in Britain and its colonies) records will show a different date.
In countries with many planned caesareans and inductions, Tuesdays to Thursdays have the most births and Sundays the fewest, because hospitals schedule fewer procedures at weekends. Before planned births were common, the days were close to even.
Every 5, 6 or 11 years, in a cycle that repeats every 28 years (leap years shift the pattern). The calculator lists the next one, and how many times it has happened so far.
It is an English nursery rhyme first written down in 1838, in A. E. Bray’s Traditions of Devonshire. Versions differ: some give Friday the “full of woe” line instead of Wednesday. It is folklore, not a forecast.
No. It runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.