House (whole-sign)

A chart's twelve houses each cover a different area of life: the first is you, plainly; the seventh is your closest partnership; the tenth is your work and how visibly you're doing it, and so on around the wheel. This site uses the whole-sign method, the simplest version: one sign is house one, and each following sign in order becomes the next house. In a birth chart that first sign is your Ascendant, which is why the chart tools ask for a birth time; on the daily horoscope pages, which need no birth data, it is your Sun sign instead — the solar-house convention every newspaper column quietly uses. Other systems slice the sky by degree rather than by whole signs, which can shift a planet near a boundary into a neighboring house — whole-sign avoids that ambiguity entirely, at the cost of some finer detail. The day gets a similar twelve-part treatment elsewhere on this site too, in Planetary hours, dividing daylight itself into twelve unequal stretches rather than twelve signs.