Mayan Tzolkin
The Tzolkin is the sacred 260-day calendar of the Maya. It works like two interlocking wheels: 20 day signs and 13 tones that turn at the same time. The calculator above shows the day sign, tone and kin number for any date.
Today: November 7, 2026
This is a chosen day: the seal and tone describe the character of the day itself.
The Goodman–Martínez–Thompson correlation (GMT, 584283) is the classic variant accepted in Maya studies; it matches the day count still kept in highland Guatemala.
How the Tzolkin works
260 days is 20 times 13. Each day receives two designations: a day sign out of twenty and a tone out of thirteen. The combination repeats exactly every 260 days; in Maya studies this span is called the Tzolkin, and an individual day is called a kin.
Why exactly 260 is not known for certain. There are three theories: the length of human pregnancy, the interval between the sun's zenith passages at the latitude of Copán, and the visibility cycle of Venus. None has been proven.
Our calculation uses the Goodman–Martinez–Thompson (GMT) correlation, number 584283, the one accepted in academic Maya studies. The reference point is August 11, 3114 BCE, the day 4 Ahau.
What the result means
The day sign is the image of the day. Imix, Ik, Akbal and so on around the circle, twenty in all. It defines what the day is about: beginnings, the word, home, death, clarity. All twenty day signs.
The tone is a number from 1 to 13; it sets not the theme but the strength and stage. The first tone is intention, the seventh is the midpoint and balance, the thirteenth is the limit and completion. All thirteen tones.
The kin is the sequence number of the day in the 260-day cycle. It is handy when you need to compare two dates: the same kin means the same combination of day sign and tone.
The classic Tzolkin and the Dreamspell
It is important not to mix things up here. There are two different counts.
The classic Tzolkin is the one reconstructed from inscriptions and still used in communities in the Guatemalan highlands. It has run without interruption since pre-Columbian times, and it is the one our calculator uses.
The Synchronary, also known as the Dreamspell, is José Argüelles's system: he set out the idea in his book “The Mayan Factor” (1987), and the Dreamspell itself came out in the early 1990s. It has a different starting point and a special rule: February 29 gets no kin of its own, and the count pauses on that day. The “Day Out of Time” is something else: July 25, the extra day in its calendar of thirteen moons. Because February 29 is skipped, Synchronary dates diverge from the classic Tzolkin, and the gap keeps growing.
Tone names such as “magnetic” or “spectral” come precisely from the Dreamspell: in the classic Tzolkin, tones are simply numbers. We give both layers and note which comes from where.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't my kin match what another site showed?
Almost certainly because that site uses the Dreamspell (Synchronary) count, while we use the classic Tzolkin.
Does the Tzolkin predict events?
No. For the Maya it was a calendar of rituals, farm work and naming: a child was often named after their birth day. The predictive function in its modern form is a later layer.
What about the “end of the world in 2012”?
That was a change of cycle in a different Maya calendar, the Long Count, not in the Tzolkin. There is no prediction of the end of the world in the inscriptions.