Sak is the eleventh of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Sak, glossed as the white storm, sak meaning white, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. Sak is the third of the colour-named run of months, Chen, Yax, Sak, and Keh, whose glosses join a colour to the sense of storm or the turning year. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, built of eighteen twenty-day months and a closing five-day period and meshed with the 260-day sacred count in the fifty-two-year Calendar Round.
Sak, the eleventh month, is generally translated as white, one of the four colour-direction terms, alongside red for east, black for west and yellow for south, that recur throughout Maya cosmology to mark the cardinal points, white conventionally associated with the north. Whether the month name's colour sense was intended to carry that directional symbolism, or is instead a coincidental homophone with a separate meaning lost to the record, is not settled among epigraphers, and this atlas notes the ambiguity rather than asserting the directional reading as fact. Diego de Landa's account of the Yucatec ritual year does not single out Sak with a distinctively documented ceremony beyond the general pattern of renewal observed across the calendar's middle months, and the month's Classic-period glyph is likewise not conclusively tied to a colour-direction rite.