The month

Born in January

Written 26 September 2026. By the BirthAlmanac team.

Star signs: Capricorn, then AquariusThe sun moves into Aquarius on the 19th, 20th or 21st.
Birthstone: GarnetThe same as on the 1912 list.
Birth flowers: Carnation and snowdropThe carnation for devotion, the snowdrop for hope, as usually given today.
Days: 31Days 1 to 31 of every year.

Where the name comes from

January takes its name from Janus, the Roman god of doorways and beginnings, who was shown with two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. It became the first month of the Roman civil year in 153 BC, when the consuls began taking office on the first of January. That did not settle the matter for the next two thousand years. Across medieval Europe the year was counted from Christmas, from Lady Day on 25 March or from Easter, depending on the place and the century; Scotland moved to 1 January in 1600, and England, Wales, Ireland and the British colonies kept 25 March as the legal start of the year until 1752. January now opens the civil year almost everywhere, although many calendars keep a new year of their own beside it.

The season, north and south

A January birthday is a midwinter one in the north, where the days have been at their shortest around the December solstice and lengthen slowly through the month, and a midsummer one in the south. In South Africa it is the end of the long December break, and schools reopen in the middle of the month; in Australia the summer school holidays run on to late January or the start of February, depending on the state. The same date is a coat-and-candles birthday in Edinburgh and a beach one in Durban.

The star signs of January

A January birthday begins as Capricorn. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Aquarius on the 19th of January in 6 years (the first in 2005), the 20th in 86 and the 21st in 15 (the last in 1964), in universal time. A birthday on 19 January, 20 January or 21 January is therefore Capricorn or Aquarius 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 January had one sign all day in every one of those years: Capricorn up to the 18th and Aquarius from the 22nd.

In the astrological tradition Capricorn is an earth sign and a cardinal one, ruled by Saturn. Printed tables give it as 22 December – 19 January; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 21st or 22nd of December and left it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of January.

In the astrological tradition Aquarius is an air sign and a fixed one, ruled by Saturn, and by Uranus in modern astrology. Printed tables give it as 20 January – 18 February; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of January and left it on the 18th or 19th of February.

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 31

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

January's birthstone

January is one of the months nobody has touched: garnet was its stone on the list drawn up in 1912, and it is its stone now. The name is usually traced through Medieval Latin granatum to the pomegranate, whose seeds the red stones resemble. Garnet is a family of related minerals rather than a single one, and it comes green, orange and even colour-changing as well as in the deep red most people picture. In that red, the almandine and pyrope garnets, the iron that gives the colour is part of the mineral itself rather than a trace impurity.

Stone	1912 list	Today's list	Change
Garnet	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 →

A hand-coloured plate of two rock fragments studded with dark blood-red dodecahedral garnet crystals, one bedded in grey-green schist and one in rusty brown matrix, with two loose crimson crystals and two outline diagrams of the twelve-sided form. — *Silex granatus, Garnet* · James Sowerby · British Mineralogy, or, Coloured Figures intended to elucidate the Mineralogy of Great Britain, Volume 1, 1804

January's birth flowers

The carnation and the snowdrop make an odd pair for one month. The carnation is a Balkan plant that flowers in early summer in a garden, and it belongs to January by way of the florist, who sells it all year and in almost every colour except a true blue: the genus lacks the gene for the blue pigment, and the violet carnations sold since the 1990s were given it by genetic modification. The snowdrop is the January flower of the woods, one of the first to open in the northern year. English sees a drop of snow in it, and the botanist's name, Galanthus, sees milk, from the Greek gala.

Flower	Usually given today	In a nineteenth-century dictionary
Carnation	Devotion	“Woman's love”Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884, under “Pink, Carnation”
Snowdrop	Hope	“Hope”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 hand-coloured botanical plate of three double garden carnations on grass-like stems, one peach-and-crimson bloom and two frilled mauve blooms with darker feathered markings, shown with narrow blue-green leaves and swollen leaf-joints. — *Dianthus caryophyllus* · Curtis's Botanical Magazine, 1827

Dates to know in January

New Year's Day on the 1st is a public holiday almost everywhere that uses the Gregorian calendar. Epiphany falls on the 6th in the Western churches, while the Orthodox churches that keep the Julian calendar celebrate Christmas on the 7th, which is 25 December in their reckoning. Burns Night, on the 25th, marks the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, born in 1759, and Australia Day falls on the 26th. The Chinese new year always falls between 21 January and 20 February, so in some years it arrives in the last days of the month and a January birthday belongs to the animal of the year before.

Which weekday it falls on

The 1st of January is a Thursday in 2026, a Friday in 2027 and a Saturday in 2028, then jumps two days to a Monday in 2029, because 29 February 2028 comes between: a date moves on one day of the week a year, and two across a leap day.

In a common year January starts on the same day of the week as October, and in a leap year as April and July. Between 1920 and 2026 the 13th of January fell on a Friday in 16 years, most recently in 2023, and it next does in 2034.

January, day by day

Date	Born on the day
1 January	J. D. Salinger (1919–2010), American author Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), French educator and historian, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503), pope of the Catholic Church from 1492 to 1503, of the Borgia family
2 January	Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), French Discalced Carmelite nun, Doctor of the Church Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), German mathematical physicist and professor Mehmed IV (1642–1693), 19th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1648–1687)
3 January	J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), English writer and philologist Cicero (106–43 BC), Roman statesman, lawyer, orator, and philosopher Michael Schumacher (1969–), German racing driver
4 January	Isaac Newton (1643–1727), English mathematician and physicist; born 4 January 1643 in the Gregorian calendar, 25 December 1642 in the Julian Gao Xingjian (1940–), Chinese novelist and playwright Louis Braille (1809–1852), French educator and inventor of braille
5 January	Umberto Eco (1932–2016), Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967), German politician, Chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963 Bradley Cooper (1975–), American actor
6 January	Joan of Arc (1412–1431), French military leader in the Hundred Years' War and Catholic saint Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), Lebanese-American writer, poet, and painter Rowan Atkinson (1955–), English actor, comedian, and screenwriter
7 January	Millard Fillmore (1800–1874), president of the United States from 1850 to 1853 Jeremy Renner (1971–), American actor Nicolas Cage (1964–), American actor
8 January	Elvis Presley (1935–1977), American singer and actor Stephen Hawking (1942–2018), British theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author David Bowie (1947–2016), English musician and actor
9 January	Richard Nixon (1913–1994), president of the United States from 1969 to 1974 Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), French philosopher, social theorist and activist Karel Čapek (1890–1938), Czech writer
10 January	Donald Knuth (1938–), American computer scientist and mathematician Leonid Kravchuk (1934–2022), Ukrainian politician, 1st President of Ukraine Robert Woodrow Wilson (1936–), American astronomer
11 January	William James (1842–1910), American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), American Founding Father and statesman Matteo Renzi (1975–), Italian politician
12 January	Jack London (1876–1916), American author, journalist and social activist Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), Indian Hindu monk and philosopher Haruki Murakami (1949–), Japanese writer
13 January	Wilhelm Wien (1864–1928), German physicist Orlando Bloom (1977–), English actor and model Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), South African-British biologist, Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002
14 January	Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), French-German physician, theologian, musician, and philosopher Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), Japanese author Jason Bateman (1969–), American actor
15 January	Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), American Baptist minister and civil rights leader Molière (1622–1673), French playwright and actor Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970
16 January	Susan Sontag (1933–2004), American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973), President of Cuba from 1940 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959 Dian Fossey (1932–1985), American zoologist, gorilla researcher
17 January	Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), American polymath and statesman Muhammad Ali (1942–2016), American boxer Michelle Obama (1964–), lawyer and former First Lady of the United States (2009-2017)
18 January	Montesquieu (1689–1755), French philosopher Kevin Costner (1955–), American actor and filmmaker Cary Grant (1904–1986), British-American actor
19 JanuaryCapricorn or Aquarius	Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), American writer and literary critic James Watt (1736–1819), British engineer Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), French painter
20 JanuaryCapricorn or Aquarius	Federico Fellini (1920–1993), Italian filmmaker André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836), French physicist and mathematician Buzz Aldrin (1930–), American astronaut
21 JanuaryCapricorn or Aquarius	Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916), Russian mystic IShowSpeed (2005–), American influencer, musician and online streamer Paul Allen (1953–2018), American businessman and philanthropist, co-founder of Microsoft
22 January	Lord Byron (1788–1824), English Romantic poet and lyricist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English philosopher and statesman Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), Soviet filmmaker
23 January	David Hilbert (1862–1943), German mathematician Stendhal (1783–1842), French writer Édouard Manet (1832–1883), French painter
24 January	Frederick the Great (1712–1786), King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 Luis Suárez (1987–), Uruguayan association football player Moon Jae-in (1953–), President of South Korea from 2017 to 2022
25 January	Volodymyr Zelenskyy (1978–), President of Ukraine since 2019 Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), English modernist writer Robert Burns (1759–1796), Scottish poet and lyricist
26 January	Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), United States Army general in WWI, WWII and Korea Paul Newman (1925–2008), American actor José Mourinho (1963–), Portuguese association football manager and former player
27 January	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Austrian composer of the Classical period Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), British author and scholar Wilhelm II (1859–1941), German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 to 1918
28 January	Nicolas Sarkozy (1955–), 23rd president of the French Republic from 2007 to 2012 Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), American painter Gianluigi Buffon (1978–), former Italian footballer
29 January	Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), Russian dramatist and author William McKinley (1843–1901), president of the United States from 1897 to 1901 Romain Rolland (1866–1944), French author
30 January	Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), president of the United States from 1933 to 1945 Felipe VI (1968–), King of Spain since 2014 Dick Cheney (1941–2025), Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009
31 January	Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Austrian composer Justin Timberlake (1981–), American singer and actor Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–2023), Japanese writer and Nobel Laureate

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.