The Chinese zodiac assigns each year an animal from a twelve-year cycle — rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig — and this calculator returns the animal for a given date of birth, together with the element from the parallel cycle of five that gives the full sixty-year sequence.
The trap is the start of the year. The Chinese year does not begin on 1 January but at the new moon that falls between 21 January and 20 February, which shifts the boundary by up to seven weeks and moves with the lunar calendar. Anyone born in January or early February belongs to the previous animal year, not the one shown on their January calendar — a birth on 20 January is very often the tail of the preceding animal. This is far and away the most common mistake in casual lookups, and the calculator uses the actual new moon dates rather than a fixed cut-off.
In Britain the dates matter for a practical reason beyond curiosity: the Lunar New Year celebrations in London's Chinatown, Manchester and Liverpool are pegged to that same moving date, which is why they land in different weeks from one year to the next. The animal shown here is the year animal only, not the month, day and hour animals used in a full reading.
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