About 12 Chinese Zodiac Signs

It answers three questions precisely. Which Chinese zodiac animal a birth date belongs to, using the sign calculator. Which animal governs a given year. And when a person's own animal year returns, through the ben ming nian tracker.

Around those tools sit twelve sign guides and a set of reference guides covering how the cycle is built and where the calendar boundaries come from.

A Chinese zodiac year begins at Chinese New Year, not on 1 January. That boundary moves between 21 January and 20 February, so treating the Gregorian year as the zodiac year is wrong for roughly thirty-five days annually — about a tenth of the calendar. Every tool here changes years at the verified boundary rather than on 1 January, which is the single thing most casual zodiac lookups get wrong.

It does not convert Gregorian dates to full Chinese lunar dates, and it does not publish an almanac. It does not teach the wider system of heavenly stems, earthly branches and the five phases beyond naming them in a result. It does not run a pair-by-pair compatibility finder, and it does not publish horoscopes, fortunes or predictions of any kind.

Those are separate subjects that deserve separate treatment. This site stays on the twelve signs.

The animal, element, polarity, Gan-Zhi name and the exact start and end dates of a zodiac year are calculated from a published conversion table. Personality traits, compatibility groupings and customs are traditional cultural material, labelled as interpretation wherever they appear. The methodology page sets out exactly which is which. A date that looks wrong is worth telling us about.