UTC

What Does UTC Mean?

UTC means "Coordinated Universal Time."

UTC is the time standard used in aviation, computing, navigation, weather forecasting, and many other fields. It's essentially the modern replacement for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for most purposes.

The abbreviation UTC does not align exactly with the English phrase Coordinated Universal Time, which should be abbreviated as "CUT," because it's a compromise between English and French. In French, the phrase is Temps Universel Coordonné, which would be abbreviated as "TUC." The international community chose UTC as a compromise.

One key difference between GMT and UTC is that UTC can include leap seconds to account for variations in the Earth's rotation, making it more precise than GMT. Despite this, in many practical applications such as civil timekeeping, UTC and GMT are often considered interchangeable.

Image for UTC

When I write UTC, I mean this:

UTC is the time standard used in aviation, computing, navigation, weather forecasting and many other fields.

Summary of Key Points

"Coordinated Universal Time" is the most common definition for UTC on Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

UTC
Definition:	Coordinated Universal Time
Type:	Abbreviation
Guessability:	3: Guessable
Typical Users:	Adults and Teenagers

An Academic Look at UTC

UTC is classified as an initialism. Initialisms are abbreviations pronounced one letter at a time.

Other examples of initialisms are:

• FBI - "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
• CEO - "Chief Executive Officer."

Initialisms are different to acronyms, which are abbreviations spoken as words. For example:

• GOAT - "Greatest Of All Time."
• NATO - "North Atlantic Treaty Organization."

Example of UTC Used in a Text

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