LogFAQs > #932170172

Okay so here is my take on this

"What decade is it" can mean different things depending on how you ask

If you ask me is 2020 a part of the 10's or the 20's, I would say it's a part of the 20's, because, no shit

If you ask me "when does the 203rd decade AD begin", however, I would say it begins on 2021

The latter question is almost always irrelevant in colloquial usage though - it only really matters if you require mathematical precision, which is rare

In most cases, in informal, colloquial usage, which is 99% of all contexts, I am thinking about the 10's, the 20's, etc. If I'm making a "best game of the decade" list I am going by the 10's, aka 2010-2019, because that's in modern usage what we think of as a decade.

Nobody cares that this creates a weird gap from the years 1 AD to 9 AD (there is no year 0 in the Gregorian calendar) where there is only 9 years in a decade, because that happens over 2000 years ago and it bears no real relevance or effect on how we decide to partition 10 years today, which mind you, is already an arbitrary concept, made up by humans who like to divide things into 10's. How we choose to divide them by 10's is entirely up to us, and quite frankly, I have doubts that anyone who makes the "decade starts at 2021" argument actually thinks of the decade like that, kind of like how I don't think most people internally interpret Sunday as the beginning of the week (unless your work week really does start that day). It's just needless pedantry in an area of life that really doesn't need it.

For most meaningful intents and purposes, as meaningful as describing a decade can even be in the first place when it's a fully arbitrary measure of time, a decade starts at the year ending in 0 and ends in the year ending in 9, because that's how nearly everyone perceives it. I'm a hardcore, fully-committed linguistic descriptivist, so this is all that matters to me.