[tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation

Hank W hankw1 at austin.rr.com
Fri Jan 18 19:00:54 UTC 2013


It surprises me that there is disagreement among Bangladesh newspapers regarding the abbreviation of their own time zone.  I remember before the internet newspapers (and encyclopedias) were the ultimate source for settling pub disputes.  That is why I failed to confirm my finding with additional newspapers.

timeanddate.com has been using BST as well.  I hate ambiguous time zone designations (especially the king of them all, CST, which can mean UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+8, UTC+9:30 or UTC+10:30), and I suspect that it was the ambiguity that drove bdnews24 to switch from using BST (which stands also for British Summer Time) to using BdST, especially since Bangladesh was once a British colony.  I plan to check periodically to see if a trend is underway.

Hank W.
Time Lord Wannabe

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert at cs.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 22:02
To: Hank W
Cc: Time Zone Group
Subject: Re: [tz] Bangladesh's TZ Abbreviation

Thanks for the heads-up.  A Google search of "Bangladesh Standard Time site:bd"
from UCLA yielded the following examples:

BST
http://www.parliament.gov.bd/cpa/Time%20Zone.htm
http://www.undp.org.bd/info/contact.html
http://www.bpdb.gov.bd/download/Meghnaghat%20PQ%20Amendment%20Notice%2018.03.2010.pdf
http://www.newstoday.com.bd/index.php?option=details&news_id=2333656&date=2013-01-07
http://www.lgd.gov.bd/Tenders/PQ_Document.pdf
http://www.powercell.gov.bd/index.php?page_id=250

BDST
http://mail.banglanews24.com.bd/English/detailsnews.php?nssl=64b69edbdbebddfb07106576108edc00&nttl=2013010160787

>From this admittedly limited sample, it would appear that the most common abbreviation is "BST", with "BDST" being used by banglanews24 but being rare elsewhere.

Perhaps the TZ database should switch to "BST"?





More information about the tz mailing list