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The Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world today. It is a reform of the Julian calendar, first proposed by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, and decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom it was named, on 24 February 1582 by papal bull Inter gravissimas. more...

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Years in the reformed calendar continue the numbering system of the Julian calendar, which are numbered from the traditional Incarnation year of Jesus, which has been labeled the "anno Domini" (AD) era, and is sometimes labeled the "common era" (CE), otherwise known as the "Christian Era".

The changes made by Gregory corrected the drift in the civil calendar which arose because the mean Julian calendar year was slightly too long, causing the vernal equinox, and consequently the date on which Easter was being celebrated, to slowly drift forward in relation to the civil calendar and the seasons.

The Gregorian calendar system dropped 10 days to bring the calendar back into synchronization with the seasons and, to keep it there, adopted the following leap year rule:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 was not a leap year; the year 2000 was a leap year.

In the Julian calendar, all years exactly divisible by 4 are leap years.

Description

The Gregorian solar calendar is an arithmetical calendar. It counts days as the basic unit of time, grouping them into years of 365 or 366 days. The solar calendar repeats completely every 146,097 days, which fill 400 years, and which also happens to be 20,871 seven-day weeks. Of these 400 years, 303 (the "common years") have 365 days, and 97 (the leap years) have 366 days. This gives an average year length of exactly 365.2425 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds.

A Gregorian year is divided into twelve months of irregular length (but note that there is a period of 153 days divided over 5 months in an alternating pattern from March to July that repeats from August to December):

A calendar date is fully specified by the year (numbered by some scheme beyond the scope of the calendar itself), the month (identified by name or number), and the day of the month (numbered sequentially starting at 1).

Leap years are all years exactly divisible by 4, with the exception of those exactly divisible by 100, but not by 400. These 366-day years add a 29th day to February, which normally has 28 days. Thus, the essential ongoing differential feature of the Gregorian calendar, as opposed to the Julian calendar, is that the Gregorian omits 3 leap days every 400 years. This difference would have been more noticeable in modern memory were it not for the fact that the year 2000 was a leap year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendar systems.

Read more at Wikipedia.org