English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have been reading answers to this question. Someone has written this phrase:
In the late 90s/early 00s, Java became an extremely popular language for server-side business applications
I know we read 90s as nineties. But I am not able to read the bold text above. How do we pronounce it? Something like zero zero iz?
Contextually, whenever decades are referred to by their last two digits, they refer to decades that have occurred in the last 100 years. As you've already noted, 90s is read as "nineties", 80s is read as "eighties" and so on. However, unlike those decades, there isn't a clear consensus as to what to call the 00s.
Some of the terms used include the "noughties" (deriving from the British name for the digit 0), "aughts" (an archaic word meaning "nothing at all", referencing the double 00s) as well as "two thousands" (deriving from the fact years from 2000-2009 were often referred to as "two thousand and number").
Personally I read it as "two thousands", but as far as I know there's no clear accepted standard.
