The Wood Dog year starts February 10, not January 1
Chinese zodiac years follow the lunar calendar, so the "1994 zodiac year" doesn't line up with the 365 days most people picture when they see the number 1994. The Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table, the official reference for converting between the two calendars, labels the relevant lunar year Jia-Xu (甲戌) and marks February 10, 1994 as the first day of the first lunar month, the actual start of the new year. That is an official government-published table, not a private calendar site's estimate.
The year doesn't end on December 31 either. The Observatory's table for the following year shows the twelfth and final lunar month of Jia-Xu running out on January 30, 1995; the next day, January 31, opens the following lunar year, Yi-Hai (乙亥), Wood Pig. That puts the full Wood Dog window at February 10, 1994 through January 30, 1995, a span of 355 days that leaves out the first forty days of calendar-year 1994 entirely. Anyone born January 1 through February 9, 1994, that excluded stretch, falls before the boundary and belongs to the outgoing year instead, Gui-You (癸酉), Water Rooster, confirmed by the Observatory's own 1993 table. This calendar's 1991 Chinese Zodiac page runs the same boundary check for a different pairing, Metal Goat, where the cutoff instead lands on February 15.
A widely used celebrity zodiac list gets one of its own examples wrong
That nine-day gap between January 1 and the February 10 cutoff isn't just a technicality. Three musicians and actors born in early 1994 land on opposite sides of it. Justin Bieber, born March 1, 1994, and Dakota Fanning, born February 23, 1994, were both born well after the boundary and are correctly Wood Dogs. Harry Styles, born February 1, 1994, was born nine days before it, which makes him a Water Rooster by the same Observatory table, not a Dog.
Famous Birthdays' "1994 Chinese Zodiac | Wood Dog" roundup page lists Harry Styles among the year's Dog-sign celebrities regardless. It's an easy mistake to make at scale: most celebrity-zodiac roundups map a birth year straight onto a zodiac animal without checking whether a given birthday falls before or after that specific year's lunar new year, which shifts by roughly a month from one year to the next and can land anywhere from late January to mid-February. A page built that way will misclassify anyone whose birthday falls before that particular year's lunar new year, whenever in that January-to-mid-February range it happens to land; Styles's entry is one visible instance of it.
Wood, not Fire, Earth, Metal, or Water: why the element matters
"Chinese zodiac" usually gets shortened to just the animal, but the traditional calendar assigns two labels to every year: an animal from a twelve-year cycle and an element from a five-element cycle, with each element covering two consecutive years, once in a yang form and once in yin, always in that order. A ten-position stem cycle carries the five elements this way, a yang year then a yin year for each element before the cycle moves to the next one; a twelve-position branch cycle carries the animals separately, one per year with no such subdivision. The two only realign every 60 years, the sexagenary cycle. 1994's stem is Jia, yang wood; its branch is Xu, the Dog.
That's why "Dog year" alone leaves out real information. 1958 was also a Dog year, but its stem was Wu, yang earth, making it an Earth Dog. 2006 was Bing-Xu, Fire Dog. The Western zodiac's Scorpio doesn't carry this kind of second layer; a Scorpio is a Scorpio no matter which year they're born in. The exact pairing Jia-Xu, Wood Dog, last occurred in 1934 and doesn't come around again until 2054; every other Dog year on the calendar between those two dates carries a different element. This site's 1988 Chinese Zodiac page walks through the identical stem-branch mechanics for a different pairing, Earth Dragon, where the lunar boundary instead falls on February 17.
The stem-branch pairing has a formal name, ganzhi, the stems-and-branches system, and it predates its use for popularizing twelve animal signs by centuries. Ten Heavenly Stems (jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui) cycle against twelve Earthly Branches (zi, chou, yin, mao, chen, si, wu, wei, shen, you, xu, hai), and each branch also carries one of the twelve zodiac animals; xu is the Dog. Ten and twelve share a greatest common factor of two, so only 60 of the 120 mathematically possible stem-branch pairings ever actually occur, which is the reason the full cycle runs 60 years instead of 120, and why a specific pairing like Jia-Xu comes back on a fixed 60-year schedule rather than any shorter interval. Before China's 1912 switch to the Gregorian calendar, that same sixty-year cycle was also how official records dated the year itself, not just a folk label attached to birth years.
Not every lunar calendar draws the boundary the same way
Vietnam's Tet follows a lunar calendar borrowed from China centuries ago, and it usually falls on exactly the same date as Chinese New Year. The two calendars are calculated using different meridians, though, and Wikipedia's entry on Tet notes a one-hour time difference between Vietnam and China that can put the astronomical new moon on different calendar days in the two systems. Most years that gap doesn't change anything worth noticing. It isn't guaranteed, though: the same Wikipedia entry documents a year where the difference was large, 1985, when Vietnam observed its lunar new year a full month before China did.
That's part of why this page cites the Hong Kong Observatory specifically instead of "the Chinese calendar" as a generic phrase. The observatory's published tables are pinned to a defined time zone and a defined astronomical method, the same standard this site applies to the birthstones by month list elsewhere on the calendar. A reader working from a Vietnamese, Korean, or other regional lunar source should confirm it uses the same reference point before assuming an identical February 10 boundary; most years it will, but 1985 shows that isn't automatic. The zodiac animals themselves aren't identical across the two traditions either. Vietnam's version swaps in the Water Buffalo, Cat, and Goat where the Chinese calendar uses Ox, Rabbit, and Sheep, a difference unrelated to the date question but easy to conflate with it. Readers checking a Vietnamese or Korean lunar-calendar source for this same year should look for that source's underlying government or observatory citation rather than assume it automatically lines up with the Hong Kong Observatory's dates.