The day pillar for Thursday, 15 July 2027

Day pillar	乙未 (yi wei)
Heavenly stem	乙 (yi)
Earthly branch	未 (wei)
Day element	Wood 木 (mu)
Polarity	Yin
Month pillar	丁未 (ding wei), governed by 小暑 (xiaoshu)

Today's day pillar is 乙未 (yi wei), a yin Wood day in the sixty-day cycle. The month pillar is 丁未 (ding wei), governed by the term 小暑 (xiaoshu).

乙 (yi), the second heavenly stem

乙 is yin Wood: the vine and the grass, growth that gets where it is going by bending.

乙 is Wood in its yin form, and the classical image is deliberately small: creeper, flower stem, new grass. Where 甲 (jia) pushes straight through, 乙 goes around, and the tradition treats that as a different method rather than a weaker one.

It sits second among the ten stems, which is what makes it yin; the stems alternate yang, yin, yang, yin all the way down. That alternation is why 乙 can only ever pair with a yin branch, so 乙丑 (yi chou) exists in the sixty and 乙子 does not.

On a 乙 day the page names Wood as the day element and yin as the polarity. Two consecutive days can both read Wood, once as 甲 and once as 乙, which is the clearest way to see that element and polarity are two separate facts.