The 141st day of the year, the 142nd in a leap year
Born on 21 May
In UTC, since 1920, 21 May has been Taurus all day in 4 years and Gemini all day in 21 years. In the other 82, the sun moved from Taurus into Gemini during the day, so a birthday then is Taurus or Gemini depending on the hour; the table below gives the moment. Those are UTC days: in 25 more years a crossing on the day before or after fell on 21 May by the clocks somewhere east or west of Greenwich, listed below the table.
- Star sign
- Taurus or GeminiThe sun changed sign on this date in 82 of 107 years.
- Birthstone
- EmeraldThe same as on the 1912 list.
- Birth flower
- Lily of the valley, HawthornUsually taken today to mean returning happiness and hope.
- Most common weekdays
- Saturday and Thursday16 times each between 1920 and 2026.
The usual first day of Gemini
21 May is the date on which the sun most often entered Gemini between 1920 and 2026: 82 times, in UTC, at times from 00:06 UTC in 1968 to 23:26 UTC in 1939. In four years at the start of the period the crossing waited for the 22nd, and since 1972 it has come on the 20th in 21 years, so in those 25 years a 21 May birthday had one sign all day.
The recent years show the pattern the whole zodiac follows. The crossing now falls on 20 May in two years out of four and on 21 May in the other two: 01:23 UTC in 2022 and 07:09 UTC in 2023 on the 21st, then 13:00 UTC and 18:55 UTC on the 20th in 2024 and 2025, and back to the 21st at 00:37 UTC in 2026.
For someone born on 21 May, the year and the hour both matter. A birth on 21 May 2023 before 07:09 UTC is Taurus. In Johannesburg the change came at 09:09 that year, and in Tokyo at 16:09.
Your year
Without JavaScript, the pages for each birth year give the generation and Chinese animal for a birth on 21 May in any year.
Which sign, by year
The sun moves from Taurus into Gemini at an instant that falls about six hours later each year and jumps back most of a day at each leap year. On 21 May that instant has fallen inside the day in 82 years since 1920; those years show the moment, in UTC and to the minute. A birth before it is Taurus, after it Gemini. To read one of these times on your own clock on 21 May, add your time zone's offset east of Greenwich or subtract it to the west, or put the year into the calculator above, which works in your own time zone.
Every year from 1920 to 2026. Where a cell shows a time, the sun entered Gemini at that moment, UTC. Why the day moves →
Other time zones
A date begins earlier east of Greenwich and later to the west, so in these years the sun changed sign on the day before or after in UTC, at a moment when clocks somewhere on earth already, or still, showed 21 May — worked out from the time zones in use at that moment, as the IANA time zone database records them. A birth there on 21 May that year could be either sign, and the calculator above works it out for your own time zone.
- 1923: the sun entered Gemini on 22 May, 02:45 UTC
- 1927: the sun entered Gemini on 22 May, 02:08 UTC
- 1931: the sun entered Gemini on 22 May, 01:15 UTC
- 1935: the sun entered Gemini on 22 May, 00:25 UTC
- 1972: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 22:59 UTC
- 1976: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 22:21 UTC
- 1980: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 21:42 UTC
- 1984: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 20:57 UTC
- 1988: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 19:57 UTC
- 1992: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 19:12 UTC
- 1996: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 18:23 UTC
- 2000: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 17:49 UTC
- 2001: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 23:44 UTC
- 2004: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 16:59 UTC
- 2005: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 22:48 UTC
- 2008: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 16:01 UTC
- 2009: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 21:51 UTC
- 2012: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 15:15 UTC
- 2013: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 21:10 UTC
- 2016: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 14:36 UTC
- 2017: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 20:31 UTC
- 2020: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 13:49 UTC
- 2021: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 19:37 UTC
- 2024: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 13:00 UTC
- 2025: the sun entered Gemini on 20 May, 18:55 UTC
Which weekday 21 May falls on
Across the 107 years from 1920 to 2026, 21 May falls on every day of the week: Saturday 16, Thursday 16, Friday 15, Sunday 15, Monday 15, Wednesday 15, Tuesday 15.
Showing 21 May in the 36 most recent years. Every weekday →
How common a birthday 21 May is
In England and Wales, from 1995 to 2014, an average of 1,831 babies were born on 21 May in each year of the twenty, making it the 122nd most common of the 366 dates, where 26 September came first with 1,974 and 26 December last with 1,359.
Office for National Statistics, How popular is your birthday? Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. What a ranking like this can and cannot say →
Born on 21 May
| Name | Years | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Albrecht Dürer | 1471–1528 | German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist |
| Andrei Sakharov | 1921–1989 | Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist |
| Philip II of Spain | 1527–1598 | King of Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily; King consort of England |
| Mary Robinson | 1944– | former President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights |
| Willem Einthoven | 1860–1927 | Dutch physiologist |
| Mario Mandžukić | 1986– | Croatian association football player |
| Henri Rousseau | 1844–1910 | French painter |
| Charles Albert Gobat | 1843–1914 | Swiss politician and lawyer |
| The Notorious B.I.G. | 1972–1997 | American rapper |
| Jeffrey Dahmer | 1960–1994 | American serial killer |
| Louis Renault | 1843–1918 | French jurist |
| Romain Gary | 1914–1980 | French writer and diplomat |
| Joseph Fouché | 1759–1820 | French statesman |
| Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis | 1792–1843 | French mathematician, mechanical engineer, and scientist |
| Mary Anning | 1799–1847 | British fossil collector and palaeontologist |
| Léon Bourgeois | 1851–1925 | French statesman |
| Günter Blobel | 1936–2018 | German American biologist (1999 Nobel Prize) |
| Lázaro Cárdenas | 1895–1970 | President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 |
Died on 21 May
| Name | Years | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Rajiv Gandhi | 1944–1991 | Prime Minister of India (1984-1989) |
| Jane Addams | 1860–1935 | American feminist social activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, philosopher, and writer |
| James Franck | 1882–1964 | German-American physicist |
| Carl Wilhelm Scheele | 1742–1786 | Swedish German chemist who discovered oxygen |
| Tommaso Campanella | 1568–1639 | Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet |
| Henry VI of England | 1421–1471 | King of England from 1422 to 1461 and from 1470 to 1471, disputed King of France from 1422 to 1453 |
| Hernando de Soto | 1500–1542 | Spanish explorer and conquistador |
| Otto von Guericke | 1602–1686 | German scientist, inventor, and politician |
| Ivan Konev | 1897–1973 | Soviet military commander |
| Christian I of Denmark | 1426–1481 | Scandinavian monarch under the Kalmar Union |
| Klaus Mann | 1906–1949 | German writer |
| Barbara Cartland | 1901–2000 | English writer and media personality |
Names are the titles of the English Wikipedia articles; years and the short descriptions are from Wikidata, which publishes under CC0, checked and corrected by hand where they needed it, and nothing is said about anybody beyond that. Ask for a removal.