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time zone A time zone is an area which observes a uniform standard time for legal, commercial and social purposes. Time zones tend to follow the boundaries between countries and their subdivisions instead of strictly following longitude, because it ...
s are defined in the ACP 121(I) standard, which is used by the armed forces for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other nations. The names are identical to the
NATO phonetic alphabet The (International) Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the NATO phonetic alphabet, is the most widely used set of clear code words for communicating the letters of the Roman alphabet, technically a ''radiotelephonic spellin ...
. Going east from the
prime meridian A prime meridian is an arbitrary meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. Together, a prime meridian and its anti-meridian (the 180th meridian in a 360°-system) form a great ...
at Greenwich, letters "Alfa" to "Mike" (skipping "J", see below) represent the 12 time zones with positive
UTC offset The UTC offset is the difference in hours and minutes between Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and local solar time, at a particular place. This difference is expressed with respect to UTC and is generally shown in the format , , or . So if the tim ...
s until reaching the international Date Line. Going west from Greenwich, letters "November" to "Yankee" represent zones with negative offsets. The letters are typically used in conjunction with
military time The modern 24-hour clock, popularly referred to in the United States as military time, is the convention of timekeeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided into 24 hours. This is indicated by the hours (and minutes) pass ...
. For example, 6:00 a.m. in zone UTC−5 is written "0600R" and spoken "zero six hundred Romeo". The letter "J" ("Juliet"), originally skipped, may be used to indicate the observer's local time. The letter "Z" ("Zulu") indicates
Coordinated Universal Time Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about one second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently use ...
(UTC).


History

Sandford Fleming Sir Sandford Fleming (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor. Born and raised in Scotland, he emigrated to colonial Canada at the age of 18. He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, ...
devised a system assigning the letters A-Y excluding J to 1-hour time zones, which may have been the inspiration for the system. The standard was first distributed by
NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...
as a note in 1950. The note states "This method is based on the systems in use in the Armed Forces of these countries and the United States".


See also

*
Lists of time zones International: * List of time zones by country – sorted by number of current time zones in the world * List of UTC time offsets – current UTC offsets * List of time zone abbreviations – abbreviations * List of tz database time zones – zon ...
*
Time zone abolition The abolition of time zones involves replacing time zones with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as a local time. History For most of part of history, the position of the sun was used for timekeeping. During the 19th century, most towns kept t ...


References


Military/NATO/Letter time zones


External links



discussion on the tz mailing list {{UTC time offsets *