Inauguration Day Kicks off 10-Day String of Palindrome Dates

The calendar is about to start looking oddly symmetrical, beginning on inauguration day. Starting on Jan. 20, 2021, there will be ten days where the dates are palindromes when listed numerically. According to a report by Penn Live, this will be the first palindrome date streak in U.S. history.

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or another sequence of characters that is spelled the same backward as forward — some famous examples are words like “kayak,” “civic” or “radar.” For the next week and a half, the dates will be numerical palindromes when described in their American form, such as “1-20-21.” Leaving the dashes out, the sequence “12021” is a palindrome, as is every remaining day until Jan. 30.

There are a couple of caveats to this unique calendrical novel. For one thing, it requires that the dates be represented in the American style — month, then a day, then a year, whereas most of the world represents it as day, then month then the year.

For another thing, the palindromes only work if you abbreviate the year to 21 rather than 2021, assuming the reader knows what Millenium and century they are in. You also need to leave out the zero in the month of January, which is notably today when many computerized calendar systems would write the date as “01-20-21,” to hold that space for two-digit months later on in the year.

All this considered, it is still a remarkable coincidence of the calendar coming up this week, especially since it seems to be the first of its kind. University of Portland professor Aziz Inan spoke to Penn Live about the occasion.

“The only two years in a century that contain 22 palindrome dates are the ones ending with 11 and 21,” Inan said. “The year 2011 had 22, and in the next century, they will be found in 2111 and 2121.”

Those with an interest in auspicious dates have probably had their eyes on the calendar over the last few years, since the first twelve years of the century allowed for days where the month, day and year were all the same — 11-11-11, for example. Others might have ascribed special significance to 2020, being the start of a new decade with an even number at the end of every date.

For the next week and a half, a much more subtle distinction will permeate the dates on the calendar. This string of palindrome dates ends on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2021.