East Asian age reckoning refers to a few different systems of counting people's age that have been used in East Asia for thousands of years. People are born at the age of "one", i.e. the first year of their lifetime, and on New Year's Day (or Chinese New Year for the Chinese) one year is added to their age. That is, age is the number of calendar years in which they have lived. It uses an ordinal numeral instead of starting with "zero" years of age, which would be the cardinal age number. (However, under the cardinal age system the number is always positive, starting with one second and not measuring years until one has elapsed.) Since age is incremented at the beginning of the lunar or solar year, rather than on the anniversary of a birthday, people are one or two years older under Asian r