Editing Leap year (section)

===Birthdays===
A person born on 29 February may be called a "leapling" or a "leaper".<ref>{{citation | date = 28 February 2012 | article = 29 February: 29 things you need to know about leap years and their extra day | title = Mirror | access-date = 7 December 2015 | url = https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/leap-years-29-things-you-746716 | archive-date = 2 January 2016 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20160102001559/http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/leap-years-29-things-you-746716 | url-status = live }}</ref> In common years, they celebrate their [[birthday]]s on 28 February or 1 March.

Technically, a leapling will have fewer ''birthday anniversaries'' than their age in years. This phenomenon may be exploited for dramatic effect when a person is declared to be only a quarter of their actual age, by counting their leap-year birthday anniversaries only. For example, in [[Gilbert and Sullivan]]'s 1879 [[comic opera]] ''[[The Pirates of Penzance]]'', Frederic (the pirate apprentice) discovers that he is [[Indentured servitude|bound to serve]] the pirates until his 21st ''birthday'' (that is, when he turns 88&nbsp;years old, since 1900 was not a leap year) rather than until his 21st ''year''.

For legal purposes, legal birthdays depend on how local laws count time intervals.

==== Taiwan ====
{{Wikisource|Civil Code Part I General Principles}}
The Civil Code of [[Taiwan]] since 10 October 1929,<ref>{{citation |title=Legislative History of the Civil Code of the Republic of China |url=http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawHistory.aspx?PCode=B0000001 |access-date=19 July 2011 |archive-date=28 December 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161228131414/http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawHistory.aspx?PCode=B0000001 |url-status=live }}</ref> implies that the legal birthday of a leapling is 28 February in common years:

{{Blockquote|If a period fixed by weeks, months, and years does not commence from the beginning of a week, month, or year, it ends with the ending of the day which precedes the day of the last week, month, or year which corresponds to that on which it began to commence. But if there is no corresponding day in the last month, the period ends with the ending of the last day of the last month.<ref>{{citation | article = Article 121 Civil Code | url = http://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?PCode=B0000001 | title = Part I General Principles of the Republic of China | access-date = 2011-07-19 | archive-date = 2021-03-04 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20210304113355/https://law.moj.gov.tw/Eng/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?PCode=B0000001 | url-status = live }}</ref>}}

==== Hong Kong ====
Since 1990 non-retroactively, [[Hong Kong]] considers the legal birthday of a leapling 1 March in common years:<ref>{{citation |title=Age of Majority (Related Provisions) Ordinance (Ch. 410 Sec. 5) |date=30 June 1997 |url=http://www.legislation.gov.hk/blis_ind.nsf/E1BF50C09A33D3DC482564840019D2F4/22F10EC537B1BEBAC825648300339AA3?OpenDocument |publisher=Hong Kong Department of Justice |access-date=19 July 2011 |archive-date=18 May 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130518152417/http://www.legislation.gov.hk/blis_ind.nsf/E1BF50C09A33D3DC482564840019D2F4/22F10EC537B1BEBAC825648300339AA3?OpenDocument |url-status=live }} (Enacted in 1990).</ref>
{{blockquote|
# The time at which a person attains a particular age expressed in years shall be the commencement of the anniversary corresponding to the date of [their] birth.
# Where a person has been born on February 29 in a leap year, the relevant anniversary in any year other than a leap year shall be taken to be March 1.
# This section shall apply only where the relevant anniversary falls on a date after the date of commencement of this Ordinance.}}

====UK====
In the UK 1 March is considered to be a leapling's legal birthday.<ref>{{cite web |title=Leap day birthdays: 'How old are you really?' |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-51176188 |publisher=BBC |access-date=3 September 2024 |date=28 February 2020}}</ref>