
Why UTC is used as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time - susam
https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-time-frequently-asked-questions-faq#cut
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haberman
The story of how the Prime Meridian was chosen has a similar flavor of
controversy. There was a conference in 1884 to decide where it would be, and a
large portion of the discussion concerned France's opinion that it should be
in a neutral place, not cutting any continent or major population center.

France wanted it to go through the Bering Strait or the Azores, and made the
argument that the SI meter (introduced nearly 100 years before) was a truly
neutral measure, being based on one ten millionth of the distance from the
equator to the North Pole. Other delegates answered that its is still a French
system, because it was France that took the measurement and introduced French
error into it.

Ultimately practical concerns won out, as 70% of the world's shipping and
charts were already using Greenwich as the meridian, and for any other place
to truly be a meridian there would need to be an observatory there with
telegraph links to the rest of the world.

Another gem is the part where the Spanish delegate expressed that he had been
authorized to vote for Greenwich as the meridian, but was doing so in the hope
that England and the United States will accept the metric system. The
president replies that this is outside the scope of the conference, to which
the Spanish delegate replies that they know this, and anyway protocol doesn't
allow them to vote on "hopes" anyway, but he just needed to say it.

Although Greenwich was chosen, France was a holdout and didn't adopt it until
1911, and even then did not call it "Greenwich Time", but rather "Paris Mean
Time retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds." This was their official
designation until they adopted UTC. The UK on the other hand still calls their
time GMT legally, even though they are actually using UTC now, which is not
precisely the same as GMT!

The proceedings make for some entertaining and enlightening reading:
[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm)

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atonse
Difference between GMT and UTC is that GMT is region specific and has daylight
saving time (UTC +1). But UTC is region independent.

~~~
tialaramex
Never use software that thinks in terms of lists of +/\- GMT zones and says
things like "GMT: Ireland, United Kingdom; Iceland". You don't live in a "GMT
Time Zone" and nobody you know has any idea what this means.

Use software which is driven by cities and uses the Olson database,
Europe/London, Europe/Dublin and so on. This is unambiguous which means things
will go wrong a lot less often.

You probably live in a city, and if you don't live in a city you there's a big
one near you. You know what time it is there. Everybody knows what time it is
there. If you're participating in an event where some people are far away they
can do any number of things to find out when "14:00 Dublin time" is exactly
and get it correct. They can even just call somebody in Dublin and ask. No
confusion about "Um, GMT. I think? Is the timezone GMT? Or UTC? Or does it
change?"

~~~
dllthomas
If by "use software" you mean "pick a time library for your product", then I
think I agree.

If you mean "use software" then this seems a little extreme.

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Deukhoofd
This answer misses how several different universal times already existed at
the time, which use abbreviations UT0, UT1, etc. UTC was a logical
abbreviation for this one, considering it follows the same style, and the
desire to find a good compromise between the French and the English speakers.

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Mobius01
I wonder why a Latin name wasn’t appropriate.

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mywittyname
Maybe because not that many (American) people learn Latin anymore.

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mhh__
That's the point, no? (No preference to a given nation)

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mywittyname
Well, my comment was more eluding to the fact that, until very recently, many
Americans learned Latin as part of their primary school education. It was
requisite knowledge for university.

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gamblor956
This has not been true in America since at least before WWII and the GI Bill.

Latin was never a part of the standard primary school curriculum.

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mywittyname
I was talking specifically about pre-WWII. My depression-era grand-parents
learned it in school.

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gamblor956
70+ years ago is not "very recent" when talking about schooling. Public
schooling has only been widely available in the US for less than 150 years and
only widely mandated for children in the last 100.

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hiasen
It is the same reason as why the International Organization for
Standardization is abbreviated ISO.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization#Name_and_abbreviations)

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blattimwind
In German "Internationale Standardisierungs-Organisation" could've been chosen
to fit ISO, but they went with "Internationale Organisation für Normung"
instead.

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LeonidasXIV
Except that that hyphen does not make much sense here, if you wanted to write
it you'd pick Standardisierungsorganisation instead which gives you a very
long word and matching that to ISO is just odd.

In official government speech words don't tend to get that long, instead they
get split into multiple ("Bundesministerium der Finanzen" instead of
"Bundesfinanzministerium").

~~~
blattimwind
That and abbreviations in German were generally not initialisms. It'd be
InterStanOrg or something weird like that.

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mfer
An international body (which included multiple organizations) who didn't want
to favor any particular language. We could use more work and thinking like
that these days.

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lacker
It’s harder to make acronyms that are a compromise between English and
Chinese.

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Razengan
{Earth Emoji}{Clock Emoji}

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dlbucci
Interesting! On an somewhat related note, could someone explain to me why
GameCube has always been abbreviated as GCN? GameCube Nintendo seems like it
would be a weird answer...

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MrCharismatist
It's because "Cube" has an N in it in the metric alphabet.

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kazinator
This is exactly the same reason why the International Organization for
Standardization is ISO.

Both are unofficial backronyms now: International Standards Organization,
Universal Time Coordinates.

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dfox
More sane backronyms are Universal Time Coordination (which seems to be used
by various metrology people) and Universal Time - Coordinated, which makes
sense given the UT0 and UT1 timescales.

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turc1656
This is one of those things that I never even thought to question - the
thought never even occurred to me that the acronym doesn't match (for English
speakers) because it just is what it is. Funny how we take certain things for
granted without thinking about them.

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denton-scratch
The ITU at that time (sorry!) was dominated by the UK (GMT) and the French.
The acronym therefore would have had to be TUC (French) or CUT (English).
There is history between the French and the English; neither was acceptable -
the ITU is an international organization, and the people who attend its
meetings are essentially diplomats.

So we get an acronym that doesn't stand for anything.

It's OK with me... but I could do without the ITU existing at all. They cause
nothing but trouble. Dammit, they should stop meddling with the definition of
UTC.

~~~
dfox
Slight clarification: at that time, there was no ITU, but CCITT, which is
decidedly french acronym ;)

~~~
denton-scratch
Thanks - you are absolutely correct.

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thomascgalvin
I wonder if there's a similar explanation for OWL - Web Ontology Language - or
if the creators just really liked smart birds.

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meej
I can't find a reference at the moment, but IIRC the rationale behind the OWL
acronym is something along the lines of "in a language about consistency, why
not have one inconsistent thing?"

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jwalton
I've heard a similar story about Asynchronous Transfer Mode. An ATM cell is 53
bytes long, which seems like a really weird number. The US wanted it to be 64
bytes as they felt this was optimal for them, everyone else wanted it to be 32
bytes, so CCITT split the difference, and made it 48 bytes plus a 5 byte
header.

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dfox
This is somewhat good idea of how standardization works, but in this case it
is not entirely correct. The argument there was essentially that ATM with
E1-like framing (and thus somewhat different and longer header) could be used
across whole france for voice beare channels without echo cancelation. The
5+48 byte with HEC framing variant at least in theory also satisfies this
(somewhat nonsencial) requirement.

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BrentOzar
tl;dr - the English acronym would have been CUT, and in French it would have
been TUC, so they picked UTC to avoid favoring either one.

~~~
journalctl
Coordinated Universal Time and Temps Universel Coordonné, respectively. In my
head I see UTC and think “Universal Time Coordinated”.

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mumblemumble
I see it, more specifically, as "Universal Time, Coordinated". It never struck
me as an acronym that demanded explanation in English.

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rbobby
Dr. Who it up a bit and make it stands for "Universal Time Coordinate".
Problem solved.

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mindcrime
It's all a big ball of time-wimey, wibbly-wobbly... stuff.

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donpdonp
I knew the French were running things on the standards end ever since v.32bis.
Having it be one or the other seems better than neither of them. When
selecting imperial or metric, we don't start using a feeter (half way between
a foot and a meter).

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mikorym
I think the French were the first to create ASCII's first predecessor if I
recall correctly, used in line of sight telegrams.

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wglb
Do you have further information on this? It sounds interesting.

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anticensor
Baudot code?

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wglb
Ah yes. Quite familiar with Baudot for several reasons. I didn't make the
connection.

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mumblemumble
So, for largely the same reason why ATM cells have a 48-byte payload.

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djhaskin987
Sorta like this comic: [https://xkcd.com/1923/](https://xkcd.com/1923/)

Replace "Fahrenheit" and "Celsius" with "English" and "French" and that's
basically what we have here. We took the average of the two (CUT vs TUC).

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Aloha
When speaking of UTC, I always speak it out as Universal Coordinated Time, or
UCT - I never thought about that until today

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agungsukma
I felt the plus/minus in the coordinate is unintuitive.

Let's use an example

07:00:00+01:00 is equal with 08:00:00+02:00.

How could 7+1=8+2?

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r00fus
UTC is unique/boring and doesn't have semantic baggage. I think that's a plus.

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cannabis_sam
Reminds me of NATO/OTAN (English/French)

~~~
stordoff
Also reminded me of CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire,
despite it now being the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche
Nucléaire/European Organization for Nuclear Research.

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jcoffland
I like to think of it as Universal Time Code.

~~~
dctoedt
"Universal Time, Coordinated" (same as "Ice cream, Vanilla")

~~~
zaat
Universal Time Clock

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perl4ever
The French.

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slowrabbit
Number of french speakers in the world... 76 million. Number of english
speakers... 1.5 billion. It should be CUT, fuck the french and bad acronyms.

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317070
Those numbers have to be off: According to wikipedia [0]:

English 379.0 million native speakers, 1.132 billion total

French 76.8 million native speakers, 279.8 million total

It seems you might have mixed the French native speakers with a (high estimate
of) the English total speakers.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers)

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mikestew
Well, holee-shit, TIL... Because with my four years of high school French, and
having never given it a lot of thought, I always assumed that because
$STANDARDS_BODY was French (I assumed, to make theory plausible), then UTC
stood for <said with heavy French accent> "Universale Time Coordinatier" or
something (and my sincere apologies to our French-speaking HN users). Had my
brain actually _engaged_ what I learned in French class, that of course would
be incredibly wrong, starting with "what the hell is that adjective doing at
the beginning of the phrase?"

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goatinaboat
It’s just the politically correct way of saying GMT or Zulu, like you are
supposed to say BCE and CE instead of BC and AD for years now.

~~~
mnw21cam
Technically UTC is not the same as GMT. The two can differ by up to 0.9
seconds.

And I'm steadfastly among the ranks of grumpy old farts who still use AD and
BC.

~~~
klodolph
> Technically UTC is not the same as GMT. The two can differ by up to 0.9
> seconds.

It’s UT1 and UTC that differ by up to 0.9 seconds. GMT and UTC are equal
unless you’re in a specialized field (navigation) where it is considered to be
UT1. Otherwise, GMT is just the name of a time zone UTC+0000.

TAI measures seconds. UT1 measures the earth’s rotation. UTC combines these by
using TAI plus a changing offset to keep within 0.9s of UT1.

