Why not 20th Century being 2000- 2999?
In: 0
There was no year 0 – we started with year 1. So year 1 thru year 100 was the _first_ hundred years, and thus the _first_ century.
We continue that tradition for every subsequent century, and use the same logic for other groupings, like decades and millennia.
if 1900-2000 was the 19th century, you would have to call 0-99 (or 1 to 100) the zero-est century. Since we’re actually counting centuries here (‘first’,’second’ ‘third’ etc), ‘zero-est’ makes no sense. The first 100 years where the first century (century means 100 years)
(Your explanatory sub-question would be about the 2nd or 3rd millennium (1000 years), not the 20th century (100 years))
Years 0-100 = first century
100-200 = 2nd century. So, year 150 is the 2nd century. Year 250 is 3rd century, and so on.
0001-0100: the first century
0101-0200: the second century
etc.
1701-1800: the eighteenth century
1801-1900: the nineteenth century
etc.
The words “first” and “twentieth” are *ordinal* counting. When you are born, it is the beginning of your first year of life, and when you turn 1 year old your first year ends and your second year begins. You are usually described as being “1 year old” for your entire second year, then you turn 2 and your third year begins.
We don’t usually describe our personal ages as being “in the Xth year” because that’s just the way we talk. We do the opposite for centuries: right now we might say that Jesus is “20 centuries old” and won’t turn 21 until the year 2100, but that still means it’s the twenty-first century since his birth.
Unless you are a programmer, most would start counting objects like years and centuries with 1 followed by 2 etc.
Year 1 is therefore the first year of the first century which extends from Year 1 to year 100.
Year 101 is (technically) called the first year of the 2nd century.
Although we sometimes say the new century “began” in 2000, technically the 21st century began in 2001 and will last until 2100.
If you have an 8-month-old child, are they in their 1st year of life or in the 0th a year of life?
Cuz we don’t have the 0th century. Starting counting from 0 could of course make sense, but by now it would feel very odd to quite many people. Year 100 is by the way 99 (full) years from the start of the calendar, since years also start from 1.
Interestingly enough, the widespread use of number 0 is a somewhat recent thing. It has been used in some contexts and it has had some equivalents historically, but for the majority of the world, for the majority of history, zero wasn’t really a very well defined concept in mathematics or record-keeping.
The calendar that our more modern calendars are based on and that started counting years from the (assumed) birth of Jesus was created in the 6th century, by Dionysius Exiguus. He was an Eastern European and European mathematics and records-keeping at the time did not recognize zero. Zero as a number did not exist.
How you are supposed the read those years is more like this: “We’re now living in the _first year_ since the birth of Jesus”. These are ordinal numerals. Think _first_, _second_, _third_. While cardinal numbers, which represent quantity or the amount of something, are the likes of _one_, _two_, _three_.
Your 1st year (the year following your birth) ENDS with your 1st birthday.
If you are 24 and 3 months old, then you have already lived 24 years and are now in the process of living your 25th year.
The centuries work the same way. The 21st century will END with 2100.
This can feel a bit confusing, which is why many mathematicians and programmers begin lists with the “0th” element rather than the “1st”. It’s a mental shift that fixes a lot of these weird confusions.
Imagine you have 10 apples. You eat 10 apples. Then you say “I have eaten 10 apples”. Ten whole apples makes a nice 10 and the tenth apple was still in the first 10 you are going to eat that day. Then you take another apple. It’s the eleventh apple. It’s the first apple towards second ten you are going to eat that day.
So how many tens of apples you have eaten before your belly starts hurting after eleventh apple? One ten and then started another set of ten-apples. So you are already within the second ten.
Same with hours, same with years. When the midnight strikes and it’s a New Years party of year “1900”, it means that 1900 years have already passed since we started using this counting system. But when the first second after midnight strikes, it’s already one second into a year 1901. You celebrate when the whole year passes.
Right now we say “it’s a year 2023”. But in reality it means 2023 years have passed since we started using this counting system (birth of Christ) and it’s actually a year 2024th. We are 7 months and 14 days into a year 2024 and on Dec 31st, 2023, 00:00 it will have been 2024 years since we started counting. 00:01 will be one second into the year 2025th, but we will be saying “it’s a year 2024”. However, clocks always say it’s a new year at 00:00 hours. Because a fraction of a second makes it already in the past.
Year 0-99 is the first century.
Year 100-199 is the second century.
Year 200-299 is the third century.
So year 200 = 3rd century, not the 2nd.
Latest Answers