Aughts

There are several main varieties of how individual years of the decade are pronounced in American English. Using 1906 as an example, they are "nineteen-oh-six", "nineteen-six", and "nineteen-aught-six". Which variety is most prominent depends somewhat on global region and generation. In American English, "nineteen-oh-six" is the most common; "nineteen-six" is less common; "nineteen-aught-six" is recognized but not much used.

In the English-speaking world, a name for the decade was never universally accepted in the same manner as for decades such as the eighties, the nineties, etc.[2][1][6]

Orthographically, the decade can be written as the "2000s" or the "'00s". Some people read "2000s" as "two-thousands", and thus simply refer to the decade as the "Two-Thousands", the "Twenty Hundreds", or the "Twenty-ohs". Some read it as the "00s" (pronounced "Ohs", "Oh Ohs", "Double Ohs" or "Ooze"), while others referred to it as the "Zeros".[1][3]

On January 1, 2000, the BBC listed the noughties (derived from "nought"[7] a word used for zero in many English-speaking countries), as a potential moniker for the new decade.[5] This has become a common name for the decade in the UK[8][9][10][11][12] and New Zealand and Australia,[13][14] as well as other Anglospheric countries. However this has not become the universal descriptor because as Douglas Coupland pointed out early in the decade "[Noughties] won't work because in America the word 'nought' is never used for zero, never ever".[15]

Others have advocated the term "the aughts", a term widely used in North America at the beginning of the 20th century for its first decade.[16][17] The American Dialect Society holds a lighthearted annual poll for word of the year and related subcategories. For 2009, the winner in the "least likely to succeed" category was "Any name of the decade 2000–2009, such as: Noughties, Aughties, Oughties, etc."[18]

When the "20-" is dropped, the individual years within the decade are usually referred to as starting with an "oh", such as "oh-seven" to refer to the year 2007. The option "aught-seven", for whatever reason, has never caught on idiomatically for the 2000s decade like it did a century earlier for the 1900s decade. When the "20-" is retained, three options are available in speech, all of which have idiomatic currency: "two thousand seven", "two thousand and seven" (the most common option in the UK and USA), or "twenty-oh-seven". During the 2000s decade, it was more common to hear the first two patterns than the last. For example, during that decade the 9/11 attacks were much more commonly spoken of as occurring in "two thousand (and) one" than in "twenty-oh-one", although the latter was not unidiomatic; whereas, by the 2010s, people grew used to hearing the "twenty-" prefix in speech more often. Under this influence, it became a bit more common to refer to the individual years of the decade as "twenty-oh-seven" or "twenty-oh-eight" than it had been during the 2000s. In the late twentieth century there had been a well established norm of the "thousand" pronunciations in such phrases such as "by the year two thousand" (i.e., by the big round millennial milestone, such-and-such prediction will be true) and the movie title 2001: A Space Odyssey, which sounded distinctly futuristic in those decades.

Look up aughts in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• List of decades