This might be a stupid question, but for that I’ve also been afraid to ask. But, I’ve been confused most of the time when people say “x-th century”. Why is the period 1900-1999 called the 20th century and not 19th century?
>In popular perception and practice, centuries are structured by grouping years based on sharing the ‘hundreds’ digit(s). In this model, the n-th century starts with the year that ends in “00” and ends with the year ending in “99”; for example, the years 1900 to 1999, in popular culture, constitute the 20th century. *(Wikipedia)*
What does it mean ‘in popular culture’? Why couldn’t, let’s say, the 19th century constitutes years within 1900-1999 and not the years before?
In: 1
Thing is, it *could* if we really wanted. We could call the period between 1900 and 1999 the “19th century”, “the 20th century”, “Dave”, “the Century of the Fruitbat”, or literally anything else. The label is an arbitrary designation that people made up to refer to a particular period of time, *in a particular calendar,* as a matter of convention. Labels like “the 19th Century” are just nicknames that came about through popular usage by the people that happen to use the Gregorian Calendar. When someone uses one of those labels, you mostly know what they are referring to, though you will often find pedants fighting about where the edges are.
Of course, that’s not to say other ways of labeling didn’t come about alongside that particular convention. We can also use phrases like “the 1800s”, or “the 80s” to refer to a group of years that share common digits in the first two or three places, for example. The criteria are different, but the label is still just something that people made up and a lot of them happened to find useful and understandable.
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