The month

Born in April

Written 26 September 2026. By the BirthAlmanac team.

Star signs: Aries, then TaurusThe sun moves into Taurus on the 19th, 20th or 21st.
Birthstone: DiamondThe same as on the 1912 list.
Birth flowers: Daisy and sweet peaThe daisy for innocence, the sweet pea for blissful pleasure, as usually given today.
Days: 30Days 91 to 120 of a common year, 92 to 121 of a leap year.

Where the name comes from

Nobody is certain where April's name comes from, and the Romans themselves did not agree. The explanation most often given is the Latin aperire, to open, for the opening of buds and leaves. Ovid, who wrote a poem on the Roman calendar, preferred to give the month to Venus and derived the name from Aphrodite, her Greek counterpart. It is the fourth month now, and was the second in the oldest Roman calendar, which began in March.

The season, north and south

In the north April is full spring, with longer evenings, the last frosts in most lowland places and the clocks already moved forward. In the south it is mid-autumn: the evenings draw in, the first cold snaps reach the Highveld towards the end of the month, and in the Australian states that keep daylight saving the clocks go back on the first Sunday.

The star signs of April

An April birthday begins as Aries. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Taurus on the 19th of April in 20 years (the first in 1972), the 20th in 83 and the 21st in 4 (1923, 1927, 1931 and 1935), in universal time. A birthday on 19 April, 20 April or 21 April is therefore Aries or Taurus depending on the year, and in the year of a crossing on the hour; the page for each of those dates gives the sign and the moment of the crossing for every year.

Every other date in April had one sign all day in every one of those years: Aries up to the 18th and Taurus from the 22nd.

In the astrological tradition Aries is a fire sign and a cardinal one, ruled by Mars. Printed tables give it as 21 March – 19 April; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 20th or 21st of March and left it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of April.

In the astrological tradition Taurus is an earth sign and a fixed one, ruled by Venus. Printed tables give it as 20 April – 20 May; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of April and left it on the 20th, 21st or 22nd of May.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Every date in April. The marked dates are the ones on which the sun changed sign in at least one year since 1920.

April's birthstone

Diamond has been April's stone since 1912, on the original list and on today's. It is carbon, and GIA calls it the only gem made of a single element. It is also the hardest natural substance, ten on the Mohs scale that ranks minerals by what will scratch what, but hardness is not toughness: a diamond can still chip, or split along its cleavage, if it is knocked at the wrong angle. The name comes from the Greek adamas, unbreakable, the same word that gave English adamant. Colourless stones are the ones most people picture, but nitrogen turns diamond yellow, boron turns it blue, and a distorted crystal lattice gives the rare pinks and reds.

Stone	1912 list	Today's list	Change
Diamond	Birth-stone	Yes	—

The 1912 list is the one the National Association of Jewelers adopted at Kansas City that August, as G. F. Kunz printed it in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), with a birth-stone for each month and an alternate for some; today's list is the one GIA publishes. The two lists compared →

Peculiar Diamonds · John Mawe · A Treatise on Diamonds and Precious Stones, 1823

April's birth flowers

The daisy and the sweet pea are April's flowers. The daisy is the day's eye, from the Old English dæges eage, because the head opens at dawn and closes at nightfall, and each daisy is not one flower but a tightly packed head of many small ones. The sweet pea is a climbing annual from southern Italy and Sicily, grown for its scent, and it has a place in the history of genetics: in 1905 William Bateson, Edith Saunders and Reginald Punnett reported that two of its traits, flower colour and pollen shape, were inherited together more often than chance allowed, the first sign of what is now called genetic linkage.

Flower	Usually given today	In a nineteenth-century dictionary
Daisy	Innocence	“Innocence”Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884
Sweet pea	Blissful pleasure	“Delicate pleasures”Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884

The meanings usually given today are a summary of the birth-flower lists printed now. The older ones are quoted from the dictionary named, under the heading it prints them. Birth flowers and the language of flowers →

A botanical plate of a double-flowered garden daisy cultivar, showing two red-and-white pompom flowerheads on hairy leafless stalks rising from a low rosette of spoon-shaped, slightly toothed leaves with visible root fibres. — *Bellis perennis* · William Curtis · The Botanical Magazine (Curtis's Botanical Magazine), Volume 7, 1794

Dates to know in April

April Fools' Day on the 1st is the day for practical jokes in much of Europe and the English-speaking world; in France and Italy the joke is the April fish, a paper fish stuck to someone's back. Earth Day, first held in 1970, falls on the 22nd. Anzac Day on the 25th is Australia and New Zealand's day of remembrance, for the landing at Gallipoli in 1915, and South Africa marks Freedom Day on the 27th, the day of the first democratic election in 1994. Easter falls in April far more often than in March.

Which weekday it falls on

The 1st of April is a Wednesday in 2026 and a Thursday in 2027, then jumps two days to a Saturday in 2028, because 29 February 2028 comes between: a date moves on one day of the week a year, and two across a leap day.

April always starts on the same day of the week as July, and in a leap year January does too. Between 1920 and 2026 the 13th of April fell on a Friday in 15 years, most recently in 2018, and it next does in 2029.

April, day by day

Date	Born on the day
1 April	Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), German statesman and Chancellor Wangarĩ Maathai (1940–2011), Kenyan environmentalist and politician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 Toshiro Mifune (1920–1997), Japanese actor
2 April	Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), Danish writer and poet Émile Zola (1840–1902), French novelist, journalist, playwright, and poet Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), Venetian adventurer and writer
3 April	Marlon Brando (1924–2004), American actor Helmut Kohl (1930–2017), Chancellor of West Germany and reunified Germany (1982–1998) Jane Goodall (1934–2025), English primatologist and anthropologist
4 April	Maya Angelou (1928–2014), American poet, author, and civil rights activist Robert Downey Jr. (1965–), American actor Heath Ledger (1979–2008), Australian actor
5 April	Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English philosopher Bette Davis (1908–1989), American actress Gregory Peck (1916–2003), American actor
6 April	Rafael Correa (1963–), President of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017 Maimonides (1135–1204), Medieval Jewish philosopher from Spain; 6 April is the traditional 30 March (Julian) counted in the Gregorian calendar James Watson (1928–2025), American molecular biologist, geneticist, zoologist and Nobel Laureate
7 April	Jackie Chan (1954–), Hong Kong actor and martial artist William Wordsworth (1770–1850), English Romantic poet Russell Crowe (1964–), New Zealand actor
8 April	Kofi Annan (1938–2018), 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology Mary Pickford (1892–1979), Canadian actress and producer
9 April	Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), French poet and critic Jean-Paul Belmondo (1933–2021), French actor Kristen Stewart (1990–), American actress
10 April	Steven Seagal (1952–), American actor, martial artist, and film producer Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Dutch jurist and scholar Omar Sharif (1932–2015), Egyptian actor
11 April	George Canning (1770–1827), British Prime Minister, statesman, and politician Andrew Wiles (1953–), English mathematician Alessandra Ambrosio (1981–), Brazilian model
12 April	Jacob Zuma (1942–), 4th President of South Africa (2009–2018) Montserrat Caballé (1933–2018), Spanish operatic soprano David Letterman (1947–), American comedian and television host
13 April	Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Founding Father, U.S. president from 1801 to 1809 Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Irish writer Garry Kasparov (1963–), Russian chess grandmaster and activist
14 April	B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), Indian jurist, economist, and social reformer Averroes (1126–1198), Arab Andalusian Muslim writer and philosopher Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer
15 April	Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian Renaissance polymath Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), Swiss mathematician, physicist, and engineer Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), leader of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964
16 April	Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), English actor and filmmaker Pope Benedict XVI (1927–2022), pope of the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013 Anatole France (1844–1924), French writer
17 April	Victoria Beckham (1974–), English businesswoman, fashion designer and singer Karen Blixen (1885–1962), Danish writer Sirimavo Bandaranaike (1916–2000), Prime Minister of Ceylon and Sri Lanka three times between 1960 and 2000
18 April	David Ricardo (1772–1823), British banker, classical economist and politician Michael D. Higgins (1941–), Irish politician and poet, President of Ireland from 2011 to 2025 Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), American political scientist
19 AprilAries or Taurus	Ali Khamenei (1939–2026), Supreme Leader of Iran from 1989 to 2026 Maria Sharapova (1987–), Russian tennis player José Echegaray (1832–1916), Spanish playwright
20 AprilAries or Taurus	Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), Dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945 Napoleon III (1808–1873), President of France from 1848 to 1852 and Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870 Joan Miró (1893–1983), Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist
21 AprilAries or Taurus	Elizabeth II (1926–2022), Queen of the United Kingdom from 1952 to 2022 Max Weber (1864–1920), German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), British novelist and poet
22 April	Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), founding leader of the Soviet Union Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
23 April	William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English playwright and poet Max Planck (1858–1947), German theoretical physicist James Buchanan (1791–1868), president of the United States from 1857 to 1861
24 April	Barbra Streisand (1942–), American singer and actress Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), French military and political leader Shirley MacLaine (1934–), American actress
25 April	Al Pacino (1940–), American actor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), Italian inventor and radio pioneer Johan Cruyff (1947–2016), Dutch footballer and manager
26 April	Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher and logician Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), French painter Jet Li (1963–), Chinese-Singaporean martial artist and actor
27 April	Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), president of the United States from 1869 to 1877 Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), English writer and intellectual Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher and political theorist
28 April	Saddam Hussein (1937–2006), Iraqi politician and revolutionary, president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003 James Monroe (1758–1831), president of the United States from 1817 to 1825 Penélope Cruz (1974–), Spanish actress
29 April	Hirohito (1901–1989), emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989 Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), French mathematician, physicist and engineer Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (1968–), Croatian politician and diplomat
30 April	Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), German mathematician and physicist António Guterres (1949–), Secretary-General of the United Nations since 2017 Stephen Harper (1959–), 22nd prime minister of Canada from 2006 to 2015

Three people for each date, from English Wikipedia's list of births for the day, chosen by how many Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have a page about them; each date's page lists more. Names are the titles of the English Wikipedia articles; years and descriptions are from Wikidata (CC0), checked and corrected by hand where they needed it. Ask for a removal.