The month

Born in October

Written 26 September 2026. By the BirthAlmanac team.

Star signs: Libra, then ScorpioThe sun moves into Scorpio on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th.
Birthstones: Opal and tourmalineThe same as on the 1912 list.
Birth flowers: Marigold and cosmosThe marigold for warmth, the cosmos for order, as usually given today.
Days: 31Days 274 to 304 of a common year, 275 to 305 of a leap year.

Where the name comes from

October comes from octo, eight, because it was the eighth month of the oldest Roman calendar. Emperors tried more than once to take it for themselves. Domitian, who was born in it, renamed it Domitianus, and Commodus renamed every month of the year after his titles; each change was undone when the emperor died.

The season, north and south

In the north October is full autumn, with the leaves turning and, in Europe, the clocks going back on the last Sunday. In the south it is spring: the thunderstorms and hail return to the Highveld, the jacarandas flower along the streets of Pretoria and Johannesburg and turn them purple, and the Australian states that keep daylight saving move their clocks forward on the first Sunday.

The star signs of October

An October birthday begins as Libra. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Scorpio on the 22nd of October in 3 years (2016, 2020 and 2024), the 23rd in 82 and the 24th in 22 (the last in 1979), in universal time. A birthday on 22 October, 23 October or 24 October is therefore Libra or Scorpio 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 October had one sign all day in every one of those years: Libra up to the 21st and Scorpio from the 25th.

In the astrological tradition Libra is an air sign and a cardinal one, ruled by Venus. Printed tables give it as 23 September – 22 October; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of September and left it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of October.

In the astrological tradition Scorpio is a water sign and a fixed one, ruled by Mars, and by Pluto in modern astrology. Printed tables give it as 23 October – 21 November; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of October and left it on the 21st, 22nd or 23rd of November.

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

October's birthstones

October is one of the months the lists have never disagreed about: opal and tourmaline, in that order, in 1912 and today. Opal is silica with water held in it, and its flashes of colour, called play of colour, come from diffraction: light is diffracted by tiny spheres of silica stacked in a regular grid, and the size of the spheres sets the colours. Australia has been the main source since its mines began producing commercially in the 1890s. Tourmaline comes in more colours than almost any other gem, because almost any element fits its crystal, and a single crystal can be pink at one end and green at the other.

Stone	1912 list	Today's list	Change
Opal	Birth-stone	Yes	—
Tourmaline	Alternate	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 a single opal nodule set alone on the page: an irregular water-worn lump whose broken face is milky blue-green and cream with faint yellow patches, edged along the underside by a rough dark brown weathered crust. — *Silex Quartzum, var. opalinum, Opal* · James Sowerby · British Mineralogy, or, Coloured Figures intended to elucidate the Mineralogy of Great Britain, Volume 2, 1806

A large hand-coloured engraving of a mass of parallel tourmaline prisms, honey-brown and pink, their flat hexagonal tops packed together like a colonnade, with lilac and dark grey rock along the right edge and one short, almost black prism at lower left. — *Argilla electrica, var. purpurea: Tourmaline, var. Rubellite* · James Sowerby · Exotic Mineralogy, or, Coloured Figures of Foreign Minerals, Volume 2, Tab. 89, 1817

October's birth flowers

The marigold and the cosmos are October's flowers, and both came to Europe from Mexico. The marigold meant here is Tagetes, the French and African marigolds, though neither is French or African: the genus is native to Mexico and Guatemala and was first grown in Europe in the 1530s. In Mexico its orange flowers, cempasúchil, are laid on the altars and graves of the Day of the Dead at the start of November. The cosmos was named in 1791 by the Spanish botanist Antonio José Cavanilles, from the Greek kosmos. In South Africa, where it lines the roads of the Highveld every autumn, it is said to have arrived in horse feed imported during the Anglo-Boer War.

Flower	Usually given today	In a nineteenth-century dictionary
Marigold	Warmth	“Grief”Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884
Cosmos	Order	In none of the standard ones

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 marigolds: deep orange and yellow pompom flowerheads above finely divided dark green leaves, with a single floret drawn separately. — *French marigold and Mexican marigold, Tagetes patula and Tagetes erecta* · Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse, 1897

Dates to know in October

Halloween on the 31st, the eve of All Saints' Day, has become a costume and trick-or-treat night in much of the English-speaking world. Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, falls in October or November, following the lunar calendar. United Nations Day, the 24th, marks the day the UN Charter came into force in 1945, and Canada keeps its Thanksgiving on the second Monday of the month.

Which weekday it falls on

The 1st of October is a Thursday in 2026 and a Friday in 2027, then jumps two days to a Sunday 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.

In a common year October starts on the same day of the week as January. Between 1920 and 2026 the 13th of October fell on a Friday in 15 years, most recently in 2023, and it next does in 2028.

October, day by day

Date	Born on the day
1 October	Jimmy Carter (1924–2024), president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 Theresa May (1956–), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2019 Julie Andrews (1935–), British actress, singer and author
2 October	Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), Indian independence activist Graham Greene (1904–1991), British writer, playwright and literary critic Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), Prussian-German field marshal of the German Empire, statesman and president of Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany
3 October	Zlatan Ibrahimović (1981–), Swedish association football player Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925), Russian poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982), French poet
4 October	Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), president of the United States from 1877 to 1881 Susan Sarandon (1946–), American actress and activist Buster Keaton (1895–1966), American actor, comedian and filmmaker
5 October	Denis Diderot (1713–1784), French Enlightenment philosopher, writer and encyclopedist Václav Havel (1936–2011), President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992 and of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003 Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), president of the United States from 1881 to 1885
6 October	Le Corbusier (1887–1965), Swiss-French architect, designer, urbanist, and writer Hafez al-Assad (1930–2000), President of Syria from 1971 to 2000 Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002), Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer
7 October	Vladimir Putin (1952–), President of the Russian Federation Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Danish physicist Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), German Nazi politician, head of the SS and one of the main architects of the Holocaust
8 October	Sigourney Weaver (1949–), American actress Ursula von der Leyen (1958–), President of the European Commission since 2019 Matt Damon (1970–), American actor
9 October	John Lennon (1940–1980), British musician David Cameron (1966–), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016 Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), Yugoslav novelist
10 October	Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Italian opera composer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), Norwegian polar explorer and diplomat; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Harold Pinter (1930–2008), British playwright
11 October	Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), American diplomat and activist, First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 Amitabh Bachchan (1942–), Indian film actor François Mauriac (1885–1970), French writer
12 October	Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007), Italian operatic tenor Hugh Jackman (1968–), Australian and English actor and singer Edward VI (1537–1553), king of England and Ireland from 1547 to 1553
13 October	Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989–), American politician Turgut Özal (1927–1993), 8th President of the Republic of Turkey
14 October	Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), president of the United States from 1953 to 1961 Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), German-American political theorist and philosopher Mohammad Khatami (1943–), President of Iran from 1997 to 2005
15 October	Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher Virgil (70–19 BC), Roman poet (1st century BC) Akbar (1542–1605), Mughal emperor from 1556 to 1605
16 October	Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete Günter Grass (1927–2015), German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Prime Minister of Israel from 1948 to 1953 and from 1955 to 1963
17 October	Eminem (1972–), American rapper, record producer and actor Pope John Paul I (1912–1978), pope of the Catholic Church in 1978 Arthur Miller (1915–2005), American playwright and essayist
18 October	Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Chinese historian, neo-Confucian philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty Chuck Berry (1926–2017), American musician
19 October	Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), Guatemalan writer and diplomat Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995), Indian-American astrophysicist John le Carré (1931–2020), British novelist and spy
20 October	Kamala Harris (1964–), Vice President of the United States from 2021 to 2025 Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), French poet Elfriede Jelinek (1946–), Austrian playwright and novelist
21 October	Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), Swedish chemist and inventor Benjamin Netanyahu (1949–), Prime Minister of Israel, (1996–1999; 2009–2021; 2022–present) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), English poet, literary critic and philosopher
22 OctoberLibra or Scorpio	Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), French stage actress, painter and sculptor Doris Lessing (1919–2013), British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer, and short story writer Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Hungarian romantic composer and virtuoso pianist
23 OctoberLibra or Scorpio	Pelé (1940–2022), Brazilian footballer Paul Kagame (1957–), President of Rwanda since 2000 Emilia Clarke (1986–), British actress
24 OctoberLibra or Scorpio	Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), Dutch microbiologist and microscopist Wayne Rooney (1985–), English footballer and manager James II of England (1633–1701), King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1685 to 1688; born 24 October in the Gregorian calendar, 14 October in the Julian
25 October	Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Spanish painter and sculptor Katy Perry (1984–), American singer Georges Bizet (1838–1875), French composer
26 October	Hillary Clinton (1947–), American politician and diplomat François Mitterrand (1916–1996), 21st President of the French Republic from 1981 to 1995 Evo Morales (1959–), president of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019
27 October	Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945–), president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011 and since 2023 Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), American poet and writer
28 October	Bill Gates (1955–), American businessman, investor, and philanthropist Erasmus (1466–1536), Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956–), 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 2005 to 2013
29 October	Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (1938–), President of Liberia from 2006 to 2018 Abdullah Gül (1950–), President of Turkey from 2007 to 2014
30 October	John Adams (1735–1826), Founding Father, U.S. president from 1797 to 1801 Diego Maradona (1960–2020), Argentine football player and manager Ezra Pound (1885–1972), American poet and critic
31 October	Hokusai (1760–1849), Japanese artist John Keats (1795–1821), English Romantic poet Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), Chinese military leader, President of the Republic of China from 1948 to 1975

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.