2015 Chinese Zodiac Year: Wood Goat Dates and Birth Lookup

By Astrolivo editorial team

In the Chinese lunisolar calendar convention used on this site, 2015 is the Year of the Wood Goat (Yi-wei), running inclusively from February 19, 2015 through February 7, 2016 (this same Earthly Branch, Wei, is also commonly translated in English as Sheep or Ram; our site URLs use /chinese-zodiac/goat). Because the 2015 Lunar New Year began on February 19, anyone born between January 1, 2015 and February 18, 2015 falls under the preceding Horse year rather than the Goat year.

2015 Birth-Date Lookup Table

Check your exact Gregorian birth date against the inclusive Lunar New Year boundaries below:

Inclusive Gregorian Date Range	Chinese Zodiac Animal	Year Designation
January 1, 2015 – February 18, 2015	Horse	Previous lunar year (ends the day before 2015 Lunar New Year)
February 19, 2015 – February 7, 2016	Goat	*Wood Goat (Yi-wei)*

Why Birth Year Alone Is Not Enough

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, combining lunar months with the solar cycle. Because Lunar New Year falls between late January and mid-February on the Gregorian calendar, looking only at the birth year "2015" misclassifies births during the first seven weeks of the year.

Consider a hypothetical comparison between two people born in February 2015:

Hypothetical birth on February 10, 2015: Because this date precedes the February 19 Lunar New Year, the birth belongs to the final days of the Horse year.
Hypothetical birth on February 19, 2015: Because this date is Lunar New Year's Day, the birth falls on the opening day of the Wood Goat year.

How the Wood Goat (Yi-wei) Name Works

Traditional Chinese calendar reckoning combines Ten Heavenly Stems (Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui) with Twelve Earthly Branches (the twelve zodiac animals) in a 60-year cycle anchored in modern reference tables at 1984 (Jia-zi Rat). For the lunar year starting February 19, 2015, the stem-branch pair is *Yi-wei*:

*Yi* is the second Heavenly Stem, which corresponds in traditional five-phase (wuxing) mapping to Wood.
*Wei* is the eighth Earthly Branch, represented by the Goat (or Sheep) in the Chinese zodiac sequence.

While the Goat recurs every 12 years, its paired stem rotates through the five elements. Not every Goat year is a Wood Goat; the exact Yi-wei designation repeats only once every 60 years.

How This Differs from Western Sun Signs and Four Pillars (BaZi)

Western Sun signs: Tropical Western astrology divides the solar year into 12 roughly month-long signs based on the Sun's ecliptic longitude. A Chinese zodiac animal year covers an entire lunisolar year.
Lunar New Year vs. Four Pillars (BaZi): This lookup page uses the civil Lunar New Year boundary. Traditional Four Pillars (BaZi) calculations switch the year pillar at the solar term Li Chun (start of spring, around early February) and assign stems and branches to the year, month, day, and birth hour. This table is a civil Lunar New Year lookup, not a Four Pillars chart.

Explore the full twelve-animal sequence on the Chinese Zodiac overview page or read the traditional profile for the Goat.

Sources and Reference Basis

Exact start and end dates and the Yi-wei (Year of the Goat) header come from the official Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables for 2015 and 2016 and the HKO Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches reference. The five-phase stem correspondence (Yi = Wood) follows standard wuxing mapping documented in Yoo & Yoon (2019, DOI: 10.14369/jkmc.2019.32.2.017). Notes on the lunisolar calendar and the Sheep/Goat branch translation convention follow reference material from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal Museums Greenwich. Zodiac traditions are symbolic cultural systems, not scientifically validated predictors of personality or future events.