The month

Born in July

Written 26 September 2026. By the BirthAlmanac team.

Star signs: Cancer, then LeoThe sun moves into Leo on the 22nd or 23rd.
Birthstone: RubyThe same as on the 1912 list.
Birth flowers: Larkspur and water lilyThe larkspur for an open heart, the water lily for purity, as usually given today.
Days: 31Days 182 to 212 of a common year, 183 to 213 of a leap year.

Where the name comes from

July was Quintilis, the fifth month, until 44 BC, when it was renamed in honour of Julius Caesar, who was born in it and whose calendar, in use from 45 BC, gave the year the shape it still has, apart from the Gregorian correction of 1582. It was the first month named after a person, and the precedent was followed for his successor within forty years.

The season, north and south

In the north July is high summer, usually the warmest month across Britain and much of Europe, with the long school holidays beginning. In the south it is midwinter: usually the coldest month across South Africa and south-eastern Australia, and one of the wettest in the Western Cape, where the winter rain is at its height.

The star signs of July

A July birthday begins as Cancer. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Leo on the 22nd of July in 41 years (the first in 1944) and the 23rd in 66, in universal time. A birthday on 22 July or 23 July is therefore Cancer or Leo 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 July had one sign all day in every one of those years: Cancer up to the 21st and Leo from the 24th. Those are dates in universal time, though, and a date begins earlier east of Greenwich and later to the west of it, so in some years the 21st and 24th were also the local date of a crossing somewhere far enough away; their pages list the years.

In the astrological tradition Cancer is a water sign and a cardinal one, ruled by the Moon. Printed tables give it as 21 June – 22 July; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 20th, 21st or 22nd of June and left it on the 22nd or 23rd of July.

In the astrological tradition Leo is a fire sign and a fixed one, ruled by the Sun. Printed tables give it as 23 July – 22 August; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 22nd or 23rd of July and left it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of August.

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

July's birthstone

Ruby has been July's stone since 1912, unchanged. It is corundum, aluminium oxide, coloured red by chromium; every other colour of corundum is called sapphire, which makes July's and September's stones the same mineral. At nine on the Mohs scale corundum is harder than any other natural gem except diamond. The chromium that colours it also makes it fluoresce red, and in sunlight that glow adds to the colour, which is part of why a fine ruby seems to burn. Almost every ruby on the market has been heated to improve its colour, and a great deal of low-grade material is filled with lead glass, which should always be disclosed.

Stone	1912 list	Today's list	Change
Ruby	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 engraving of nineteen numbered corundum crystals in rows, most of them rose and crimson ruby, barrel-shaped or six-sided; also an orange-brown prism, a pale grey star-stone, and at lower right one large deep blue sapphire crystal. — *Argilla durissima: Corundum, Ruby, and Sapphire* · James Sowerby · Exotic Mineralogy, or, Coloured Figures of Foreign Minerals, Volume 1, Tab. 43, 1812

July's birth flowers

Larkspur and the water lily are July's flowers. Larkspur is named for its spur, which was thought to look like a lark's long hind claw, and the genus name, Delphinium, for a dolphin, from the shape of the flower. The whole plant is poisonous: its alkaloids block the signal from nerve to muscle. The water lily belongs to one of the oldest lines of flowering plants alive, one of three that branched off before all the rest, and its genus name, Nymphaea, means sacred to the nymphs.

Flower	Usually given today	In a nineteenth-century dictionary
Larkspur	An open heart	“Lightness. Levity”Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884
Water lily	Purity	“Purity of heart”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 larkspur, showing a spike of open five-petalled violet-blue flowers each with a backward-pointing spur and a paler, bearded centre, arranged up a slender hairy stem with a few deeply lobed leaves near its base. — *Delphinium decorum* · Edwards's Botanical Register, 1840

Dates to know in July

Canada Day falls on the 1st and the United States' Independence Day on the 4th. Bastille Day, the French national day, is the 14th. Nelson Mandela International Day, on the 18th, is Mandela's birthday; the United Nations declared it in 2009, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation asks for 67 minutes of service to others that day, one for each year he gave to public life.

Which weekday it falls on

The 1st of July 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.

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

July, day by day

Date	Born on the day
1 July	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), German mathematician and philosopher Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997), member of the British royal family and Princess of Wales George Sand (1804–1876), French novelist and memoirist
2 July	Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), Polish poet, Nobel Prize winner Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961), Congolese politician and independence leader
3 July	Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Bohemian writer from Prague Julian Assange (1971–), Australian editor, publisher, and activist Tom Cruise (1962–), American actor and film producer
4 July	Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), president of the United States from 1923 to 1929 Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), Italian general, patriot and republican Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), American author
5 July	Georges Pompidou (1911–1974), President of France from 1969 to 1974 Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), French writer and film director Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), Communist activist, and advocate for women's rights
6 July	George W. Bush (1946–), 43rd President of the United States (2001–2009) Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), Mexican painter 14th Dalai Lama (1935–), 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetans
7 July	Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Austrian late-Romantic composer Ringo Starr (1940–), British musician, drummer for the Beatles Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988), American author and aeronautical engineer
8 July	Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695), French poet, fabulist and writer John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), American industrialist and philanthropist Igor Tamm (1895–1971), Soviet physicist
9 July	Tom Hanks (1956–), American actor and film producer Viktor Yanukovych (1950–), President of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014 Pyotr Kapitsa (1894–1984), Soviet physicist
10 July	Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Serbian-American engineer and inventor Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French novelist, critic and essayist Mahathir Mohamad (1925–), Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and 2018 to 2020
11 July	John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), President of the United States from 1825 to 1829 Alexander Prokhorov (1916–2002), Soviet and Russian physicist Giorgio Armani (1934–2025), Italian fashion designer
12 July	Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), Roman general and dictator Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), Chilean poet and politician Malala Yousafzai (1997–), Pakistani children's education activist
13 July	Harrison Ford (1942–), American actor Wole Soyinka (1934–), Nigerian writer Lamine Yamal (2007–), Spanish association football player
14 July	Gerald Ford (1913–2006), president of the United States from 1974 to 1977 Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007), Swedish director and screenwriter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), Austrian symbolist painter
15 July	Rembrandt (1606–1669), Dutch painter and printmaker Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), French philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), German cultural critic, philosopher and social critic
16 July	Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), Norwegian explorer; first person to reach the South Pole Larry Sanger (1968–), American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects Gareth Bale (1989–), Welsh association football player
17 July	Angela Merkel (1954–), chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021 Donald Sutherland (1935–2024), Canadian actor James Cagney (1899–1986), American actor and dancer
18 July	Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), President of South Africa and anti-apartheid activist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928), Dutch physicist Priyanka Chopra (1982–), Indian actress
19 July	Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), Russian and Soviet poet Edgar Degas (1834–1917), French Impressionist artist Brian May (1947–), British musician
20 July	Petrarch (1304–1374), Italian scholar and poet Edmund Hillary (1919–2008), New Zealand mountaineer and philanthropist Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), Moravian scientist and Augustinian friar
21 July	Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), American author and journalist Robin Williams (1951–2014), American actor and comedian Erling Haaland (2000–), Norwegian footballer
22 JulyCancer or Leo	Selena Gomez (1992–), American singer and actress Gustav Ludwig Hertz (1887–1975), German physicist Willem Dafoe (1955–), American actor
23 JulyCancer or Leo	Sergio Mattarella (1941–), president of Italy (2015–present) Haile Selassie (1892–1975), Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974 Daniel Radcliffe (1989–), English actor and film producer
24 July	Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), Venezuelan statesman and military officer Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), French writer and dramatist Jennifer Lopez (1969–), American singer and actress
25 July	Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), British chemist, biophysicist, and X-ray crystallographer Elias Canetti (1905–1994), Bulgarian-born Swiss and British Jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918), Bosnian assassin
26 July	George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), American filmmaker and photographer Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist
27 July	Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), Italian poet and literary critic Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895), French writer and dramatist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist
28 July	Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), President of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013 Karl Popper (1902–1994), Austrian-British philosopher of science Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), German philosopher and anthropologist
29 July	Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943 Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), Swedish diplomat, economist, and author Fernando Alonso (1981–), Spanish racing driver
30 July	Henry Ford (1863–1947), American business magnate Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947–), Austrian and American actor, bodybuilder, and politician Emily Brontë (1818–1848), English novelist and poet
31 July	J. K. Rowling (1965–), English author Milton Friedman (1912–2006), American economist and statistician Louis de Funès (1914–1983), French actor and comedian

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.