February

• According to “Ripley’s Believe it or not“, a graveyard inscription has February 30th.
• The followers of Julius Caesar took away a day from February to make July (named after Julius Caesar) have 31 days instead of 30.
• The followers of Augustus Caesar took away a day from February to make August (named after Augustus Caesar) to have 31 days instead of 30.
• February became the shortest month of the calendar year with 28 days.
  It was given back an extra day on a leap year.
• The earth takes about 365.2422 days to revolve round the sun, so the discrepancy became 0.9688 day every four years (or 97 days in 4 centuries).
• In Gregorian calendar, a leap year is defined as a non-century year that is divisible by 4, and a century year that is divisible by 400.

Latin terms for student

• Alumnus means “male student”
• Almuna means “female student”
• Alumni means “male students”
• Alumnae means “female students”.

• In modern usage, the term “alumni” applies to both male and female students.
• To save time and space, we use alum (or alumni) for all the four cases.

Synonym

• Synonyms are words which have almost the same meaning for the given context.
• Since some words have multiple meanings, one must specify the meaning associated with a synonym.
• Dictionary, Thesaurus, Lexicon and Vocabulary are synonyms.
  Their usage depends on the context.
  In general, Lexicon is a body of knowledge (or dictionary) of Latin and Greek.
  At one time, Lexicon is a card game where players create words and score points. It was superseded by Scrabble.

Antonym

• Antonyms are words which have almost the opposite meaning for the given context.
• Since some words have multiple meanings, one must be careful of the meaning associated with an antonym.
• For example, Love and Hate are antonyms.
• In Pali, the antonyms of Lobha (Greed), Dosa (Anger or Hatred) and Moha (Ignorance of Delusion) are Alobha (Non-greed), Adosa (Non-hatred) and Amoha (Non-ignorance or Wisdom).

Homonym

• Homonyms are words which sound the same.
• Examples
  rain, rein, reign
  air, heir
  throne, thrown
  
• A puzzle based on homonyms :
  “What is the difference between the Prince of Wales and a cricket ball?”
  The Prince of Wales is HEIR to the THRONE.
  A cricket ball is THROWN to the AIR.