Calendar of Meaningful Dates
Calendar of Meaningful Dates
Calendar of Meaningful Dates Each date's size represents how often it is referred to by name (e.g. "October 17th") in English-language books since 2000 (Source: Google ngrams corpus) [A regular Gregorian calendar laid out in a grid, Sunday first, on a leap year, with some numbers larger than others.]

The calendar used in the comic is the standard Gregorian calendar used by most of Western Civilization. The comic looks at the frequencies of which dates appear in English writings indexed in the Google Books Library Project , by using the Google Ngram Viewer ( link ).
Some dates are more (or less) frequently mentioned because they have a special significance. Other dates have correlations for which there doesn't appear to be any obvious reasons. September 11th, which is noted in the title text for being popular before the 9/11 attack, has also been the date of 2 significant battles in the War of 1812, one where the British landed in what was George Washington's large plantation, which likely contributed to its search volume.
The date mentioned in the sub-heading (October 17th) is Randall's birthday.
The title text mystery is explained here . In summary, many occurrences of "11th" in the writings were actually misread by the Google Books Library Project's optical character recognition software and/or reCAPTCHA users, becoming one of these: IIth , Ilth , iith , lith , llth , 1lth , 1ith , l1th , nth .
The first of each month is generally more mentioned than others, perhaps because such dates are markers of a new month and may be used as landmark dates or deadlines. Similarly, the final day of each month is commonly a deadline day. Other dates have a less mundane significance, for example:
Calendar of Meaningful Dates Each date's size represents how often it is referred to by name (e.g. "October 17th") in English-language books since 2000 (Source: Google ngrams corpus) [A regular Gregorian calendar laid out in a grid, Sunday first, on a leap year, with some numbers larger than others.]
