March 10, 2019
4:21 a.m.
On 2019-03-05 17:13, Isiah Meadows wrote: > On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 6:21 PM Paul Eggert wrote: >> On 3/5/19 3:07 PM, Guy Harris wrote: >>> Is there any information about whether "UTC" or "UCT" is the more >>> commonly used abbreviation in documents in English? >> "UTC" is far more common. For example, for me Google reports about 4,220 >> hits for the query "Universal Coordinated Time (UCT)" and about 1,080,000 >> hits for "Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)". For Google Scholar the numbers >> are 210 and 11,800 respectively. For Google Books they are 493 and 12,500 >> respectively. In all cases the double-quote characters were in the query. >> My vague impression is that "UCT" was formerly more popular than it is >> now, but it's never been as popular as "UTC". > I came up with a somewhat more permissive set of queries that seem to show a > similar disparity in usage: > - '"Universal Coordinated Time" "UCT"': about 9,620 results in search, > 344 in Scholar > - '"Coordinated Universal Time" "UTC"': about 2,580,000 results in > search, 17,900 in Scholar > - '"Universal Coordinated Time" "UCT" -"UTC"': about 4,730 results in > search, 256 in Scholar > - '"Coordinated Universal Time" "UTC" -"UCT"': about 2,250,000 results > in search, 17,600 in Scholar > The first two show just raw mentions of each, while the second two > captures how often people exclusively use one or the other. And it > paints an even starker picture. Doing some statistics: > - It appears about 4,870 search results and 88 Scholar results from a > UCT-based search mentioned both UTC and UCT, and about 330,000 search > results and 300 Scholar results from a UTC-based search mentioned > both. > - If you convert those into percentages, I get about 50.8% of all > search results and 25.6% of all Scholar results mentioning both in a > UCT-based search, but only about 12.8% of all search results and 1.8% > of all Scholar results mentioning both in a UTC-based search. > Initially, I tried '"Universal Coordinated Time" UCT' without quoting > 'UCT', and Google's search engine thought I meant to type 'UTC' > instead, assuming some sort of mistake I'm guessing. This itself could > be considered pretty telling. (It's also why I quoted both 'UCT' and > 'UTC' in all four searches.) It's also telling that excluding the UTC > acronym from the UCT search results took away literally over half of > the search results. > Note: I excluded the surrounding single quotes in each search. > Just to reiterate, I'm just coming here curious why the two are > distinct names in the database and curious if "fixing" the redundancy > would break much, not necessarily saying it *has* to be changed. I > have very little stake here personally. 113,000, 2,860, 1,610 for "Coordinated Universal Time" "CUT" on Google, Scholar, and Books -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised.