Why is 2000 called the noughties

Amongst a flurry of speculation the 'favourites' seem to be the tens and the teens. The interesting thing about all this is that it's only relatively recently, certainly at the back end of the decade, that we finally decided to plump for the noughties as the recognised English term for this period of time. And just as we've got settled, the expression already refers to an 'obsolete' concept, as we now move into a new decade.

So the search is on yet again — how should we refer to the next ten years? Amongst a flurry of speculation the 'favourites' seem to be the tens a shortened form of the twenty-tens on the model of the earlier nineteen-tens and the teens. The problem with the latter term is that it doesn't take into account the non-teenage years of , and This has led to the suggestion that these intervening years be referred to as the tweens , reverting to teens in , but that all seems a bit untidy to me.

With no obvious 'neat' solution, the debate looks likely to continue. And, after all this, the still more remarkable: the election of a certified intellectual as President, not to mention an African-American one. There was the ascent of the digital realm—with the happy surrender, on the part of hundreds of millions, to the congenial omniscience and possibly less congenial omnipotence of Google, and the perplexingly popular appeal of making available online all manner of information of the sort formerly considered private.

Or that anyone would want to? And what of those other unlikely innovations and unforeseen blights of the era—small plates, Bump for the iPhone, Sarah Palin, Chinese drywall, jeggings? Send a query. Lucky dip. Any answers? Nooks and crannies.

Semantic enigmas. The body beautiful. Red tape, white lies. Speculative science. This sceptred isle. Root of all evil. A missed opportunity indeed as it became the standard fare of every major broadcaster through the 90s and noughties. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

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