radool/romanian-name-days

Romanian Name Days and Holidays

Zile onomastice și sărbători românești — the Romanian name-day calendar as structured data.

In Romania, ziua onomastică — the feast day of the saint whose name you bear — is widely celebrated, often more than a birthday. Until now this information existed online only as HTML pages built for human readers. This is the machine-readable version.

Published by trends.ro.

Dataset summary

Names	86 (46 masculine, 40 feminine)
Diminutives	127
Occasions	35 (15 holidays, 17 saints' feasts, 3 life events)
Movable feasts	5 holidays and 4 name days follow Orthodox Easter
Language	Romanian (ro)
Licence	CC BY 4.0

Why this dataset is unusual

Movable feasts are computed, not hardcoded. Four name days — Florentina, Florin, Viorel, Viorica — fall on Florii (Palm Sunday), which moves by over a month across years. Dates are stored as rules (easter-7) and resolved with the Julian computus, so the dataset is correct for any year rather than for the year it was compiled. The Julian→Gregorian offset is computed rather than fixed at 13 days, which is only correct through 2099.

Uncertainty is recorded, not hidden. Romanian name-day attribution is not uniformly settled and sources disagree. Rather than silently picking a date, each record carries a confidence value, and anything not established carries a note explaining why:

confidence	Count	Meaning
established	63	Direct, well-attested saint's feast
convention	21	Attached to a root name by Romanian practice — e.g. Adriana → Sf. Adrian și Natalia
approximate	1	The real feast does not fit the date grammar
single-source	1	Found in one source only

Filter on confidence == "established" when you need certainty. That is what the field is for.

Fields

namedays

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Romanian given name, with diacritics
slug	string	ASCII, URL-safe, stable key
rule	string	MM-DD, or easter±N days from Orthodox Easter
movable	bool	Whether the rule follows Easter
gender	string	m, f, u
diminutives	string	Semicolon-separated familiar forms
confidence	string	See table above
note	string	Explanation; always present when confidence != established

holidays

Field	Type	Description
slug	string	Stable key
title	string	Romanian name of the occasion
kind	string	holiday, nameday, or life-event
rule	string	MM-DD or easter±N; empty for life events
movable	bool	Whether the rule follows Easter

Life events (birthday, wedding, condolences) have no date by definition — they attach to a person, not to the calendar.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

namedays = load_dataset("radool/romanian-name-days", "namedays", split="train")
print(namedays.filter(lambda r: r["name"] == "Maria")[0])
# {'name': 'Maria', 'slug': 'maria', 'rule': '08-15', 'movable': False, ...}

# Only well-attested attributions
certain = namedays.filter(lambda r: r["confidence"] == "established")

Resolving a movable rule needs the Orthodox Easter date for the target year. The reference implementation is easter.mjs in the GitHub repository, which also ships pre-resolved calendars for 2026–2035 and .ics calendar feeds.

Other formats

The CSVs here are the ML-friendly view. The same data is also published as:

• GitHub — canonical JSON, CSV and .ics, plus the build and its tests
• zile-onomastice on npm — typed, zero dependencies, with the Easter computus and date resolution built in

Provenance

Feast dates follow the calendar of the Romanian Orthodox Church (calendar.patriarhia.ro). Attribution of given names to those feasts, the diminutives, the gender field and the convention judgements are editorial work done for trends.ro, cross-checked against Romanian calendar sources with disagreements recorded rather than resolved.

Dates are Gregorian, matching Romanian civil usage.

Limitations

• 86 names is common usage, not exhaustive. Rarer Romanian names, and regional or minority-language names, are not covered.
• Orthodox-centred. Romanian Greek-Catholic and Roman Catholic calendars differ on some dates; this dataset follows the Orthodox calendar, which is the majority practice.
• Not a liturgical reference. It records which names people celebrate on which day, not the full synaxarion.

Licence and citation

CC BY 4.0 — commercial use, modification and redistribution are all permitted. Training, fine-tuning, retrieval and evaluation are expressly permitted. Attribution is the only condition.

Source: trends.ro — Zile onomastice și sărbători românești, CC BY 4.0

This licence covers this dataset only. Poems and other content on trends.ro are community-authored works under their authors' rights and are not included.

Contributing

Corrections are the most valuable contribution. Open an issue on GitHub with the name, the date, and a source. Where sources disagree we prefer to add a note over picking a winner.