“What’s your sign?” A short history of the icebreaker

Type & Stars · 1 November 2026

“What’s your sign?” grew out of newspaper columns that, from the 1930s, let readers look themselves up by birthday. By the 1970s it was a well-known bar opener, well known enough to become a joke. In 2023 young people in China were opening with “are you an i or an e?” instead. The words changed, but the job didn’t: it’s an easy way to ask a stranger what they’re like.

1930: a column you could look yourself up in

Princess Margaret was born on 21 August 1930. Three days later the Sunday Express in London ran a feature by R. H. Naylor about the stars at her birth. It was about one baby, not about the paper’s readers.

Readers wrote in for more. On 31 August the headline was “Were you born in September?”, and on 12 October the paper began a weekly column keyed to birth dates. Readers could now find themselves in that paper with nothing more than a month and a day.

The twelve boxes came later. The People added sections labelled by date range in 1933, the New York Post ran a section for each sun sign in 1936, and by 1940 every mass-circulation Sunday paper in Britain carried a column like this. By 1975, by one count, about 1,250 of 1,500 American daily papers did too.

That made the twelve signs something nearly everyone could talk about, whether or not they took them seriously.

1968 to the 1970s: the opening line

In 1968 Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, a book on the twelve signs, became an American best-seller. It’s often described as the first astrology book on the New York Times list. We couldn’t check that against the list itself, so treat it as widely repeated rather than proven.

By the 1970s “What’s your sign?” was remembered as the line you’d hear in a singles bar. Harry Nilsson used it as a song title in 1975. Nobody we could find reliably knows who said it first. It got used so much that it became a punchline.

People kept asking anyway. In 2022 one big dating app said 78% of its active US members showed a star sign on their profile.

1921 to 2023: two letters

The other question has a separate history. In 1921 the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung published Psychologische Typen (in English, Psychological Types, 1923), describing two basic attitudes: introversion, where interest turns inward, and extraversion, where it turns toward the outside world. He didn’t coin the words, which are centuries older in English, but he gave them the psychological meaning we use now.

A century later those two words shrank to two letters. In August 2023 China’s Wenhui Daily reported that young people who once judged whether they’d click by interests and star signs had moved on to “are you an i or an e?” That autumn China Youth Daily described university freshmen using it to break the ice, and one student compared a personality type to a business card. A piece on The Paper carried a headline saying the question had become an opening line.

In December 2023 the Shanghai language newspaper Language Weekly put “i-person / e-person” on its top ten internet buzzwords of the year.

Why people keep asking

The two questions ask the same thing: what are you like? There’s also a half that goes unsaid: do we get along?

This is our reading, not a finding. Asking a stranger “what are you like?” is awkward. Asking their sign or their letter is easy, and it gives both of you something to disagree about. Neither label has to be right for that to work. The Chinese psychologists quoted in that coverage urged caution about treating types as fact, and we agree.

Timeline

When	What happened
1921	Jung publishes Psychologische Typen
24 Aug 1930	Sunday Express runs Naylor’s feature on the newborn princess
31 Aug 1930	Follow-up headline: “Were you born in September?”
12 Oct 1930	Weekly column keyed to birth dates begins
1933 to 1936	Sun-sign sections appear in British and American papers
1968	Sun Signs is published and becomes a best-seller
1975	Harry Nilsson releases a song called “What’s Your Sign?”
2022	A big dating app says 78% of active US members show a star sign
2023	“Are you an i or an e?” spreads among young people in China
8 Dec 2023	Language Weekly lists “i-person / e-person” among its top ten internet buzzwords

Things people often get wrong

“Naylor invented star signs.” No. The zodiac is ancient, and star features ran in American papers by the early 1900s.
“The first twelve-sign column ran in 1930.” No. The 1930 piece was about one baby, and Naylor’s early columns went by birth date. Twelve-sign layouts came during the 1930s and were standard by the 1940s.
“Jung invented the words introvert and extravert.” No. He gave older words their psychological meaning.
“Jung invented the four-letter test.” No. The four-letter, 16-type format came later, from other authors.
“i-person / e-person was on China’s official buzzword list.” No. It wasn’t on the 2023 lists from the national language monitoring centre or from Yaowen Jiaozi. It was on Language Weekly’s list, which is from a Shanghai paper.

Try both questions in one round

Sources

* For entertainment and ice-breaking only. Not a psychological assessment and not a prediction of any kind.