[tz] Terminology: “Central European Summer Time” vs “Europe/Berlin”

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue Apr 13 19:35:55 UTC 2021


On 4/13/21 6:54 AM, Michael[tm] Smith via tz wrote:
> In the time zone taxonomy, if the term for “Europe/Berlin” is clearly “time zone”,

The theory.html file consistently uses the word "timezone" for that, 
distinguishing between "timezone" and "time zone" as follows:

"Each timezone typically corresponds to a geographical region that is 
smaller than a traditional time zone, because clocks in a timezone all 
agree after 1970 whereas a traditional time zone merely specifies 
current standard time."

As I vaguely recall, this was after some discussion of alternative terms 
for the notion, terms like "tzdb regions". All the terms had problems 
(obviously "timezone" has the problem of being too close to "time 
zone"), but "timezone" won the day at the time. I believe part of the 
reason for avoiding the word "region" was to bypass political issues of 
control of geographical regions.

In theory.html, strings like "CEST" are called "time zone 
abbreviations". There is no term in theory.html for phrases like 
"Central European Summer Time" as these phrases are not in tzdb. I 
suppose we could call them "time zone display names" or something like that.


More information about the tz mailing list