calends — English Dictionary

Noun

1. Often with initial capital: the first day of a month.

   Usage

   • plural
   • Plural only

   Synonyms

   Kal.

   Examples

   The third day before the calends of February is 30 January, the third calends of March is 27 or 28 February, and the third of the calends of May is 29 April.

   The Roman Month its ſeveral days divides / By reckoning backwards, Calends, Nones, and Ides.

   More examples (10)

   Now by the ſame Rule, if there was a very Ancient Folkmote in the Neighbouring Kingdom of France upon every Kalends of May, then perhaps King Arthur borrowed from them; and it is good to look upon our Kalends, becauſe it is poſſible they may give Light to Ours.

   The Poſt of ſwift-foot Time / Hath now at length begun / The Calends of our middle Age, / Our bloſſoms they are gone.

   The Romans did not, as we do, count the days of the month in a regular numerical succession, but reckoned them with reference to three principal points of time—the Calends, the Nones, and Ides. The first day of every month was entitled its Calends. […] The Calends were originally the day of the new moon, which received its name from the fact that on that day the Pontifex addressed the moon in presence of the people, in the words "Calo te, Jana Novella," "I call upon thee, new moon," which was repeated as many times as intimated to his hearers the number of days before the arrival of the Nones.

   Let it not be lawful to use wicked observations of the calends, and to keep the gentiles' holy-days, nor to deck houses with bays or green boughs; for all this is an heathenish observation.

   Among the ancient Romans it was an annual institution for every family to give a banquet, to which only near relatives were bidden. On this occasion family feuds were healed, and all envy, hatred, and malice, laid aside; as an emblem of restored harmony, gifts were interchanged. This ceremony took place during the festival known as Carisia, held in honour of the goddess Concord, and was celebrated during the eight days preceding the Calends of March (February 22 to March 1).

   If January calends be summerly gay, / 'Twill be winterly weather till the calend of May.

   Blockheads, friends of my heart and liver, cousins of my tripe, are you ignorant that this symposium is as authentic as any of those tales of the Greek Calends, which you swallow and digest so easily,[…]?

   My book with Professor [John Ronald Reuel] Tolkien – any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man – is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!

   The interesting thing about these ceremonies is that they must have originated in a period when the Romans were using true lunar months based on the observation of the crescent moon. The Kalends then would have been the day after the evening on which the crescent had been first sighted, the Nones would have been the first day when the moon was at the first quarter […] In the calendar of the late Republic the lunar months have disappeared and the days have been fixed into a rigid pattern.

   [March, May, Quintilis, and October] also have their Nones on the seventh, as Numa [Pompilius] ordained, because Julius Caesar changed nothing about them. As for January, Sextilis, and December, they still have their Nones on the fifth, though they began to have thirty-one days after Caesar added two days to each, and it is nineteen days from their Ides to the following Kalends, because in adding the two days Caesar did not want to insert them before either the Nones or the Ides, lest an unprecedented postponement mar religious observance associated with the Nones or Ides themselves, which have a fixed date.

2. Often with initial capital: the first day of a month. The first day of a month of the Roman calendar.

   Usage

   • Ancient-Rome
   • Historical
   • plural
   • Plural only

3. A day for settling debts and other accounts.

   Usage

   • broadly
   • plural
   • Plural only

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   To expedite theſe knots were worthy a learned and memorable Synod; while our enemies expect to ſee the expectation of the Church tir'd out with dependencies and independencies how they will compound, and in what Calends.

4. Synonym of Rosh Hodesh (“the Jewish festival of the new moon, which begins the months of the Hebrew calendar”).

   Usage

   • Judaism
   • broadly
   • Obsolete
   • plural
   • Plural only

   Examples

   More examples (2)

   The feasts of the Israelites were the Sabbath; the first day of each month, called in our translations calends, or new-moon; the three great feasts of the passover, pentecost, and tabernacles, instituted in memory of the three greatest blessings they received from God, […]

   חֹדֶשׁ m. […] the new moon, the day of the new moon, the calends of a lunar month which was a festival of the ancient Hebrews, Num[bers] 29:6; 1 Sam[uel] 20:5; 18:24; Ex[odus] 19:1, […]

5. Synonym of calendar; (figurative) an account, a record.

   Usage

   • plural
   • Plural only
   • Rare

   Examples

   [N]ow doth [John] Oldcastle shine: / Him for a Saint within your Kalends hold.

6. The first day of something; a beginning.

   Usage

   • Figurative
   • Obsolete
   • plural
   • Plural only

   Examples

   Whoever shall sell a calf or a yearling, let him be answerable against the scab from the calends of winter until the Feast of Patrick.