酉
Year of the Rooster
yǒu · 10 of 12 · the hours of 17:00 – 19:00
Punctual, precise, and going to mention what you missed.
Years of the rooster
1933 · 1945 · 1957 · 1969 · 1981 · 1993 · 2005 · 2017 · 2029
Each one begins at that year's new year, not on 1 January — so a January birthday in one of these years belongs to the animal before.
The rooster keeps time and keeps standards. Observant, exact, hard-working and direct to a fault, it is the sign most likely to notice the error and least likely to let it pass unremarked.
The tradition pairs that reliability with bluntness. A rooster's honesty is meant kindly and does not always land that way, and the sign's own work is learning which observations actually need saying out loud.
In Japan the same branch is read tori — Read simply as the bird. The twelve are the eto there, and they still name the hours, the directions and the years.
Which animal you actually are depends on the day you were born rather than the year on the certificate — work it out exactly, free, from the real lunisolar boundary.