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There is no "0" year, 1 is the 1st year, so 100th year is still the 1st century, therefore 2nd century starts in 101 and 20th in 1901.
by d0mine 2y ago
There is no "0" year, 1 is the 1st year, so 100th year is still the 1st century, therefore 2nd century starts in 101 and 20th in 1901.
- notfed 2y agoI find this decree frustrating. Someone could have just as easily said "the 'first' century starts at 1 BC" to account for this.
- 38 2y agoOr better yet just year 0, why not? Do we say the 80s start in 1981?
- rdlw 2y agoThe concept of zero was not popularized in 500s Europe, when the system was devised.
- karatinversion 2y agoAnd also, the system is a direct descendant of regnal numbering, where zero wouldn’t have made sense even if invented (there is no zeroth year of Joe Biden’s term of office).
- Thorrez 2y agoThen what is the last year of the first century BC? 2 BC? Now there's an off-by-2!
- karatinversion 2y agoDo you also count the first decade of your life from January 1st of the year before you were born?
- Zambyte 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
- coldtea 2y agoDoesn't matter, we can just agree the first century had 99 years, and be done with it. We have special rules for leap years, that would just be a single leap-back century. At the scale of centuries, starting 2nd century at 100 as opposed to 101 is just an 1% error, so we can live with it. For the kind of uses we use centuries for (not to do math, but to talk roughly about historical eras) it's inconsequential anyway.
- hypertele-Xii 2y agoWhat? 0 is the year Jesus Christ was born.
- incognito124 2y agoNo, jesus was born in 1AD
- zimbu668 2y ago"Most scholars, on this basis, assume a date of birth between 6 and 4 BC" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Jesus