![]() The name comes from the fact that each time zone in GMT has an alphabetical letter designation, and the zone at the Royal Observatory is labeled Z. Zulu TimeĪnd just to make things even more complicated, GMT or UTC are also sometimes known as “Zulu time.” According to, the “Zulu time” designation is mostly used in aviation and in the military. I noticed too that the abbreviation “UTC” doesn’t match the words “Universal Coordinated Time.” It turns out the abbreviation is a compromise meant to be acceptable to people speaking different languages. GMT is also known as Universal Coordinated Time, abbreviated UTC, and the time in other time zones outside of the Greenwich zone is sometimes written as a plus or minus offset from GMT, so the time in New York can also be referred to as GMT-5 or UTC-5.* The Associated Press includes the local time and GMT in some international stories, and when they do, it’s written in parentheses after the local time, so if a story includes Eastern Daylight Time and GMT, for example, it would be written as “5 p.m. GMT uses a 24-hour clock that’s tied to the time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Multiple international listeners have suggested using GMT (Greenwich mean time) as an alternative because it is the same for everyone. For example, you capitalize all the words in “Pacific Standard Time” and “Pacific Daylight Time,” but just the word “Pacific” if you refer to simply “Pacific time.” GMT and UTC Generally, you capitalize all the words when you’re writing the full name of the time zone and capitalize just the first part when you’re using a shortened version. If you’re one of those people, it’s better to simply use “ET” as an abbreviation for “Eastern time” instead of getting it wrong. However, as many readers have noted over the years, it’s common for people not to know whether we’re in daylight saving time or standard time and to write EST throughout the year and not just during standard time. If you need to indicate that a time is in a certain time zone, the simplest way to do it is to put the time zone abbreviation after the time: for Eastern Standard Time, write “4:30 p.m. So during standard time, it is the same time in Arizona and Utah, but during daylight saving time, it is an hour earlier in Arizona because Arizonans don’t “spring forward” like other regions in the same time zone. Arizona, for example, doesn’t participate in daylight saving time, but other states in the same time zone do. ![]() ![]() Some time zones don’t participate in daylight saving time, and a few places divide their region into half-hour zones.Īctually, it’s even more complicated than that. For us the world is divided into 24 time zones, and each zone differs by an hour from the time zone next to it. Most countries have signed on to the idea of a standard world time system. The preferred spelling is ‘daylight saving time.’Ī sad footnote is that supposedly we don’t save energy anymore by switching to daylight saving time because the energy we save by not having to turn on the lights as early is more than offset by how much more we run our air conditioners while we’re home in the warmer evenings. The words are not capitalized, and there’s no hyphen. Remember the spelling by thinking that the whole idea was that people were saving energy. When the United States joined the war, lawmakers agreed that moving the clocks was a good way to save energy, and in the official 1918 law that established the time change in the U.S., they named it “daylight saving time.” It is still generally agreed to be “daylight saving time” today, and not “savings time” (1, 2, 3)- no S at the end. Britain and Germany were the first countries to institute a time change during World War I.
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