About time...

about-time

Sven Vermeulen Thu 24 February 2011

I was just wondering why "UTC" stood for "Coordinated Universal Time". Apparently (okay, citing Wikipedia here, so be critical), it's of two main reasons: English and French speaking folks that were participating in that discussion wanted their language to be presented in the abbreviation (English wants "CUT - Coordinated Universal Time", French "TUC" - Temps Universel Coordonné), so a consensus was taken to use "UTC" which gladly followed another time convention (UT1, UT2, ... for universal time notations - which is the second reason).

Little did I know that it is UTC that has leap seconds (sometimes you hear in the news that the last minute of a year lasts 61 seconds) whereas UT1 (which is the modern notation for GMT) doesn't.

All that because I read about a meeting taking place at 2000 UTC...