The ''aughts'' (
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
) or ''noughties'' (
British English
British English (BrE, en-GB, or BE) is, according to Lexico, Oxford Dictionaries, "English language, English as used in Great Britain, as distinct from that used elsewhere". More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in ...
) are terms referring to the decade
2000 to 2009. These arise from the words ''aught'' and ''nought'' respectively, both meaning
zero
0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation
Positional notation (or place-value notation, or positional numeral system) usually denotes the extension to any base of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (or ...
.
In the English-speaking world, a name for the decade was never universally agreed on as it was for decades such as the eighties, the nineties, etc.
[Washington Examiner, December 1, 2009; modified March 16, 2012]
Say, goodbye to the aughts, zeros, 2000s, whatever
retrieved March 1, 2013.
The ''noughties'' became a common name for the decade in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand and Australia.
Although use of the word ''aught'' to refer to zero is not widespread in the United States, the use of ''aughts'' to identify the decade became common there.
References
{{reflist
2000s
decades