Daylight Saving Time

Many parts of the world are moving from standard time to daylight saving time (also called summer time) this week, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about the phrase “daylight saving time” and time in general. I still have to think of the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” every time we do this to figure out what to do with my clocks. Since it’s spring, I’ll be moving my clocks ahead Saturday night before I go to bed. Technically, the time changes at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, but it’s not like I’m going to wait up just to change my clocks.

Daylight saving time  

Britain and Germany were the first countries to institute a time change during World War I. When the United States joined the war, lawmakers agreed that moving the clocks was a good way to save energy, and in the official 1918 law that established the time change in the U.S., they named it "daylight saving time.” It is still generally agreed to be “daylight saving time" today, and not "savings time” (1, 2, 3)— no S at the end. 

Remember the spelling by thinking that the whole idea was that people were saving energy. The words are not capitalized, and there’s no hyphen.

The preferred spelling is 'daylight saving time.'

A sad footnote is that supposedly we don’t save energy anymore by switching to daylight saving time because the energy we save by not having to turn on the lights as early is more than offset by how much more we run our air conditioners while we’re home in the warmer evenings.

Next, we’ll talk about time zones.

Time zones

Most countries have signed on to the idea of a standard world time system. For us the world is divided into 24 time zones, and each zone differs by an hour from the time zone next to it. Not everyone uses this system though. Some time zones don't participate in daylight saving time, and a few places divide their region into half-hour zones. 

Actually, it's even more complicated than that. Arizona, for example, doesn't participate in daylight saving time, but other states in the same time zone do. So during standard time, it is the same time in Arizona and Utah, but during daylight saving time, it is an hour earlier in Arizona because Arizonans don't "spring forward" like other regions in the same time zone. 

If you need to indicate that a time is in a...

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