Graeme Wall wrote: > On 18/08/2013 22:44, Richard Smith wrote: >> On 18/08/13 22:06, Graeme Wall wrote: >>> On 18/08/2013 20:30, Richard Smith wrote: >>>> On 18/08/13 20:24, Graeme Wall wrote: >>>> >>>>> 1900s plural is the decade, just as 1920s plural is the decade. >>>> >>>> You may use that convention, but a lot of people do use 1900s to mean >>>> the century, so the ambiguity is still there. >>> >>> Not something I've noticed, usually if you are dealing in centuries you >>> refer to the 19th or 20th or whatever. >> >> That's what I do too. (Though even that is open to a certain degree of >> ambiguity -- in the ISO 8601 format for centuries, "19" denotes the 20th >> century. Fortunately the ISO 8061 century format is pretty rarely used.) >> >>> Just goes to show you have to be very careful in making sure your date >>> references are unambiguous. >> >> Absolutely. The whole subject is riddled with ambiguities. Just to >> take one other example, does 1 Jan 1700 refer to the day after 31 Dec >> 1699, or the day after 31 Dec 1700? I rather suspect my database has a >> mixture of styles, even though my convention is to rewrite dates to be >> in the former style. >> > > > Convention is to write 1699/00 or 1700/01 as appropriate though, like > you, I convert to new date format to avoid the ambiguity. Same here but there's then a problem with published sources where it's not made clear whether such conversion has been done. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk