A new moon. Ramadan, like all months of the Islamic calendar, begins with the first sighting of the new moon
16 April 2021; minor update on 21 April 2021
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and in that religious tradition is given over to fasting between sunrise and sunset and to acts of charity. Unlike the Christian season of Lent, which—in Roman Catholicism and many other Christian traditions—focuses on personal suffering and atonement, Ramadan is intended as a period of spiritual reflection and community, with the meals before and after the daily fast being times of conviviality and sharing. There are liberal dispensations for those who cannot fast, and if one cannot fast on a day, one can add an additional day at the end or give alms to the poor to make up for it.
Since the Islamic calendar is a lunar one, in the solar calendar Ramadan falls eleven days earlier each year, taking thirty-three years to pass through all the seasons.
As one might expect, the word is an Arabic one, derived from رَمِضَ (ramidha) meaning scorching heat. The name of month predates Islam, and since pre-Islamic Arab culture used a solar calendar Ramadan would have consistently fallen in the summer, hence the name.
Ramadan appears in English by the late fifteenth-century. The first known appearance is in a translation of Alain Chartier's Le Traité de l’Esperance (The Treatise of Hope). The passage gives a rather unflattering portrait of Islam:
Moreouir this fals prophete gadred owt of the two Testamentis certeyn abstinences of mete and drynke and lyeng with women in certayn dayes till the sonne war down, which he callid the Fastes of the Moneþe of Ramaȝan.
Chartier’s original French is de mois Ramazan, and his use is one of the first in that language too.
Many of the early appearances in English (and French) use the spelling Ramazan. In Iran and Turkey, the Arabic letter ض (Ḍād) is pronounced as /z/, which indicates the proximate source for those early appearances is probably Persian, perhaps as it was spoken in Turkey, rather than a direct borrowing from classical Arabic.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. Ramadan, n.
Blayney, Margaret S. Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Alain Chartier's Le Traité de l’Esperance and Le Quadrilogue Invectif, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society 270. London: Oxford UP, 1974, 92. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson A.338
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Ramazan, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Ramadan, n.
Photo credit: Ronnie Robertson, 2016. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.