What Is My Zodiac Sign?

For entertainment and reflection only. Astrology is a cultural tradition, not a science, and this result is not a prediction or relationship advice.

What your zodiac sign actually is

When someone asks "what's your sign?", they mean your sun sign: the one of twelve zodiac signs the Sun appeared to be passing through on the day you were born. Seen from Earth, the Sun traces the same path against the background stars every year, a line astronomers call the ecliptic. Astrology divides that circle into twelve equal 30-degree segments, starting with Aries, and the Sun spends roughly a month in each one.

The system is old. The twelve-sign zodiac took shape in Babylonian astronomy during the first millennium BCE and was taken up by Greek-speaking astrologers in the Hellenistic period, who added most of what horoscopes still use today: the elements, the ruling planets and the personality themes attached to each sign. Modern Western astrology continues that tradition. It is a symbolic language, not an astronomical measurement of personality.

How the finder works

The finder only uses the month and day of the date you enter; the year makes no difference. It checks that month and day against a fixed table of twelve date ranges, the same ones printed in most horoscope columns, and shows the matching sign with three details from the table:

• Element: Fire, Earth, Air or Water. Each element covers three signs.
• Ruling planet: the planet traditionally linked to the sign. The table uses the modern rulers, so Aquarius shows Uranus, Pisces shows Neptune and Scorpio shows Pluto. Before those planets were discovered, astrologers gave the same signs to Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.
• Date range: the first and last day of the sign, written day/month, so 21/3 – 19/4 means March 21 to April 19.

A short paragraph of the traits traditionally associated with the sign appears underneath. The lookup happens entirely in your browser.

The twelve signs and their dates

• Aries: March 21 – April 19 · Fire · Mars
• Taurus: April 20 – May 20 · Earth · Venus
• Gemini: May 21 – June 20 · Air · Mercury
• Cancer: June 21 – July 22 · Water · Moon
• Leo: July 23 – August 22 · Fire · Sun
• Virgo: August 23 – September 22 · Earth · Mercury
• Libra: September 23 – October 22 · Air · Venus
• Scorpio: October 23 – November 21 · Water · Pluto
• Sagittarius: November 22 – December 21 · Fire · Jupiter
• Capricorn: December 22 – January 19 · Earth · Saturn
• Aquarius: January 20 – February 18 · Air · Uranus
• Pisces: February 19 – March 20 · Water · Neptune

Worked example

Say you were born on October 8, 1994. The finder ignores 1994, takes October 8, and finds it inside the Libra range (September 23 to October 22). The result shows ♎ Libra, element Air, ruling planet Venus, and the range 23/9 – 22/10. A friend born on July 22 lands on the last day of Cancer, while someone born a day later, on July 23, gets Leo. A February 29 birthday falls in Pisces.

Born on a cusp?

Fixed date ranges are a convenient approximation. What astrology actually tracks is the moment the Sun moves from one 30-degree segment into the next, and that moment shifts by up to about a day from year to year, because the 365- or 366-day calendar never lines up exactly with the solar year. The start of Aries, for example, is tied to the March equinox, which can fall on March 19, 20 or 21 depending on the year and your time zone.

So if your birthday is within a day of a boundary, such as March 20 or 21, or December 21 or 22, the answer here may not match a full birth chart. Settling it needs your birth year, time and place, which a chart calculator uses to find the Sun's exact position. Popular astrology sometimes describes people born near a boundary as a blend of both signs, but in the tradition itself the Sun is always in one sign or the other.

Why another site may give you a different sign

This tool uses the tropical zodiac, the standard in Western astrology, in which Aries always begins at the March equinox. The constellations have slowly shifted against the equinox because of a wobble in Earth's axis called precession, at about one degree every 72 years. The two frames lined up roughly 2,000 years ago and are now more than 20 degrees apart (overview of sidereal and tropical astrology).

Vedic (Jyotish) astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, which follows the stars, so most people's sidereal sun sign is the sign before their tropical one. Neither answer is a mistake; they are two consistent conventions. The Chinese zodiac is a separate system again, based on birth year rather than birthday, and the Chinese Zodiac Compatibility calculator will tell you your animal sign.

Common misconceptions

• "There's a secret thirteenth sign." The Sun does pass in front of the constellation Ophiuchus, but the tropical zodiac is a division of the sky into twelve equal segments, not a list of constellations, so the number of signs doesn't change.
• "My sun sign is my whole chart." Astrologers treat it as one piece of a birth chart that also includes the Moon, the rising sign and the planets. Two people with the same sun sign can have very different charts.
• "The traits are a scientific profile." They are traditional associations. Controlled tests, such as a double-blind study published in Nature in 1985, have not found that astrology describes personality better than chance (Carlson, 1985).

What this tool doesn't do

It doesn't calculate your Moon or rising sign, which need an exact birth time and place, and it doesn't produce forecasts. Its job is narrow: tell you, from a date alone, which sun sign Western astrology assigns and what the tradition associates with it. From there, the Zodiac Compatibility Checker compares two signs by element.

Zodiac signs by month

Each sign starts partway through a month, so every calendar month is shared by two signs. Using the same fixed date ranges this finder uses:

• January: Capricorn until the 19th, Aquarius from the 20th
• February: Aquarius until the 18th, Pisces from the 19th
• March: Pisces until the 20th, Aries from the 21st
• April: Aries until the 19th, Taurus from the 20th
• May: Taurus until the 20th, Gemini from the 21st
• June: Gemini until the 20th, Cancer from the 21st
• July: Cancer until the 22nd, Leo from the 23rd
• August: Leo until the 22nd, Virgo from the 23rd
• September: Virgo until the 22nd, Libra from the 23rd
• October: Libra until the 22nd, Scorpio from the 23rd
• November: Scorpio until the 21st, Sagittarius from the 22nd
• December: Sagittarius until the 21st, Capricorn from the 22nd

These are the traditional horoscope-column ranges. If your birthday is on one of the switch-over days, the exact answer depends on your birth year, as explained above.

Modalities: cardinal, fixed and mutable

Besides the four elements, Western astrology groups the signs into three modalities (also called qualities) of four signs each. The four cardinal signs start at the four turning points of the tropical year. Aries begins at the March equinox, Cancer at the June solstice, Libra at the September equinox and Capricorn at the December solstice. The tradition links cardinal signs with starting things. Each is followed by a fixed sign, traditionally linked with persistence, and then a mutable sign, linked with adaptability, which closes out the season before the next cardinal sign. Because each modality contains one sign of each element, no two signs share both the same element and the same modality. These are traditional associations within astrology, not measured traits.

Zodiac chart: symbols, Unicode, modality and element

The symbols are standard Unicode characters, so you can copy them straight from the table, or type the code point in apps that support Unicode input. Unicode's official name for ♏ is SCORPIUS, the astronomical constellation name, though astrology calls the sign Scorpio. On many phones these characters are shown as colorful emoji; the Special Characters tool has more symbols to copy.