1998 is a Yang Earth Tiger year in the Chinese sexagenary cycle. The full designation is Wu Yin (戊寅): Wu is the Heavenly Stem and Yin is the Earthly Branch, and the branch is what people are actually naming when they say "the year of the tiger".
The sexagenary cycle combines ten Heavenly Stems with twelve Earthly Branches and rolls them together like two gears of different sizes. Ten and twelve share a common factor of two, so only sixty distinct pairings exist before the pattern restarts. That is why the Tiger does not return every twelve years with the same character: 1998 is the Earth Tiger, while the Tiger years sixty years either side carry a different stem and therefore a different element.
In the Chinese zodiac the Tiger is brave, competitive and confident, and its branch element is Wood. This is the layer most people are asking about when they ask what a 1998 birth means. The full Tiger profile covers the temperament on its own; the elements below are what make 1998 specific.
An Earth stem year puts the emphasis on stability, follow-through and the long view. People born in these years are usually the ones holding a project together while others rotate through it. Earth is slow to commit and slow to leave, which reads as reliability from the outside and as being stuck from the inside. The cost of a doubled Earth is rigidity — defending a position after it stopped being useful.
Yang years carry the active, outward expression of the element. The stem sits in its "bright" phase, which shows up as a preference for direct action — you would rather move and correct than wait and be sure.
The Tiger layer contributes brave, competitive and confident. Set that against a yang Earth stem and you get the specific version: direct and outward in how the traits are expressed, with earth priorities — stability and follow-through.
Born in the 1990s, you grew up with the internet already present and had to learn its rules as they were being written.
In relationships the Tiger instinct is brave, while the earth stem decides how that shows up. Yang years carry the active, outward expression of the element. The stem sits in its "bright" phase, which shows up as a preference for direct action — you would rather move and correct than wait and be sure. Partners tend to read the animal first and the stem later — which is why people are often surprised by how the same Tiger handles commitment so differently from one another.
For the pairing side, see Tiger compatibility and the full 132-pair compatibility table.
Career-wise, the Wu Yin combination favours work where the earth priority is actually valued. Roles with a long horizon, where staying is the advantage. The Tiger layer adds brave, competitive and confident on top of that.
1998 is the year of the Tiger — Wu Yin (戊寅), combining the stem Wu (Earth) with the branch Yin (Tiger). In the common shorthand it is called a Yang Earth Tiger year.
1998 carries two elements in two different systems. The Heavenly Stem Wu is Earth, which is the one people usually mean when they ask about the element of a birth year. The Earthly Branch Yin belongs to Wood in the twelve-branch system. The stem element leads; the branch element modifies it.
The sixty-year cycle means the exact combination of stem, branch and element repeats every sixty years. 1938 and 2058 are the same Yang Earth Tiger year. The animal alone returns every twelve years, but with a different stem and therefore a different element.
No. The birth year is one layer of the Chinese system, alongside the month (the inner animal), the day and the hour. Popular usage collapses all of it into the birth-year animal because that is the part everyone knows. Treat the reading here as one accurate layer rather than a complete chart — it is specific, but it is not the whole picture.
Every sign. A calendar year contains all twelve sun signs, so "what sign were 1998 babies" has twelve answers depending on the birth date. 1998 began on a Thursday and had 365 days. If you want the Western side, use the birthday pages instead — this page covers the Chinese birth-year layer, which is the one that does narrow to a single answer.