A day on Venus outlasts its year

Venus takes 243 Earth days to spin once relative to the stars, and only 225 Earth days to orbit the sun.

Radar in the 1960s found a slow retrograde spin. The sidereal day, star to star, is longer than the Venusian year. The sun still rises and sets, because orbit and spin combine. A solar day on Venus — sunrise to sunrise — is about 117 Earth days, shorter than the year.

So the famous sentence is true of the sidereal rotation and false of the sundial. Both numbers are measured. The planet also spins backwards relative to its orbit. Whatever hit it, or dragged on it, left a clock that runs the long way.