1982 Chinese Zodiac: Water Dog, Years and Compatibility

1982 is a Water Dog year

The year 1982 carries the Dog, and more precisely the Water Dog. The sexagenary cycle — the sixty-term count that pairs one heavenly stem with one earthly branch — names it 壬戌 (Ren-xu). Ren is the ninth of the ten stems and one of the two assigned to Water; Xu is the eleventh of the twelve branches, the Dog.

That pairing is what makes it a Water Dog rather than simply a Dog year. The same animal comes round every twelve years, but the stems cycle every ten, so a given stem-and-animal pair returns once in sixty: 1922, 1982, 2042.

The two conventions in use give the year different edges. Under China's national standard for the calendar the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day, so the year runs from 25 January 1982 to 12 February 1983. Chart-reading changes the sexagenary year at Li Chun, which in 1982 falls on 4 February.

1982 Compatibility: Six Places Along the Ring Is the Harmony, the Seventh the Clash

The second chapter of the Sanming Tonghui, a Ming-dynasty compendium, defines a branch clash by a count. Take the branch you start from and count seven places along the ring, counting that first branch as one, and the two branches clash. Its own example is Zi and Wu: from Zi to Wu, it says, is the number seven. Xu sits at the eleventh place, so the seventh from it — Xu, Hai, Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen — is Chen, the Dragon. The chapter puts the same count in one line: six makes a harmony, seven is excess.

The companion chapter on harmonies pairs Xu with Mao, the Rabbit, and gives its own arithmetic for the pair: it assigns Xu the number five and Mao the number four, and four and five making nine is what the two are built on. So for the Dog the two partners sit adjacent on the ring — the sixth place along is the Rabbit, the seventh is the Dragon.

A person born in 1982 therefore carries the Dragon as the branch their year clashes with, and the Rabbit as the one it harmonises with. Chinese Zodiac Compatibility Chart carries the full table of both relations for all twelve branches.

The chapter is careful about what a clash does. It closes its opening passage by saying that broken and clashed things are good in some cases and not in others, and that no single rule covers them — in its words, a clash has both good and bad outcomes and cannot be generalised. The count names a relation between two branches; it is not a verdict on a person.

What Water records on this year, and what it does not

Five stems pair with each animal over sixty years, so each sign has five forms. For the Dog those are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, and 1982 is the Water one: Ren-xu.

The form is a labelling convention rather than a description of anyone. It records which stem stood over the year in the count. A Wood Dog year (1934, 1994, 2054) and a Water Dog year (1922, 1982, 2042) carry the same animal under a different stem, and nothing in the calendar says the two are alike in character.

Chinese Zodiac: The Five Elements sets out how the stems and the animals combine across the whole cycle.

Where 1982 sits in the sixty-year cycle

The cycle is anchored at 1984, which is Jia-zi, its first term. Counting from there, 1982 falls two places before the anchor: 1980 Geng-shen, 1981 Xin-you, 1982 壬戌, 1983 Gui-hai — and then 1984 Jia-zi restarts the count.

That makes 1982 the fifty-ninth term of its cycle, the next to last, and the same position returns once every sixty years: 1922, 1982, 2042.

When the standard changes the animal first

A zodiac year does not begin on 1 January, and the day it does begin on has no single answer. China's national standard for the calendar, GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, starts the lunar year at the first month, and the animal year shares that reference: the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day. Chart-reading changes the sexagenary year at Li Chun, the solar term that opens spring.

In 1982 the two lines fall 10 days apart, and this year Lunar New Year comes first: Li Chun is 4 February and Lunar New Year's Day is 25 January. That means the national standard changes the animal 10 days before chart-reading does.

Chinese Zodiac Year Boundary lists both lines for every year from 1940 to 2030, with the gap in days for each.

A birthday in the days before Li Chun

11 calendar days in 1982 sit on or between the two lines, and 10 of them are read differently depending on which convention is in play.

The 10 days from 25 January are the contested ones. The standard moved the year on 25 January, at Lunar New Year's Day, so it reads those 10 days as Dog; chart-reading waits for Li Chun on 4 February, and until then they stay in 1981, the year of the Rooster. On 4 February the two lines meet: that day is Li Chun, and chart-reading has changed to the Dog year as well. From then on both conventions read the same animal.

A birth on the boundary day itself is the harder case, because Li Chun is a moment rather than a day. The page linked above explains why it gives days and not times.

What this page leaves out

It does not say what a Dog is like, and it does not say what 1982 means for someone born in it. The animal is a label on a year, not a description of a person.

It also does not give a time of day for Li Chun. That the term falls on 4 February is settled; the moment within the day is not available from one authoritative source across the whole span involved, so the date is given and the clock time is left out rather than filled in from a different kind of source.

Where the 1982 dates come from

Li Chun and Lunar New Year's Day for 1982 are read from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for that year, which is published one file per year. The standard behind the first line is GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory.

Both branch relations in this page come from the second chapter of the Sanming Tonghui: the section on clashes gives the count of seven places, and the section on the six harmonies gives the pairing of Xu with Mao.

How we cite sets out how sources are chosen and dated on this site.

The full table behind this page — 1901 to 2100 — is published as a free dataset: chinese zodiac year boundaries.