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I hope everyone who's sick of this topic deleted this message without reading it. Obsessive pedant that I am, I can't resist sticking my oar in here... It sounds to me like most of the discussion on this topic has been people trying to convince other people that one method of numbering years makes more sense than some other method. It's kind of irrelevent which method makes the most sense, because the standard has already been established and used for centuries. That standard says... 1. There is no year zero. 2. The first century AD includes the first hundred years AD (1 - 100 AD). The second century AD includes the second set of 100 years AD (101 - 200). The first millenium AD includes years 1 - 1000 and the second millenium includes years 1001 to 2000. Like it or not, that's the standard. If you use a different one, your BC dates will not correspond to the ones used by historians. (Of course, it won't matter much -- when talking about events that happened 2000 years ago, most people won't care if they're off by a year or two.) I know this system LOOKS like it's at odds with the "new math number line" some of us used in grade school, but I think the two are quite consistent. If you set up the years as numbers on a standard number line, they're going to look like points, but a year is really an interval (that is, a year is a period of time, not a moment in time). For me, the key to reconciling the paradox is to treat each number on the line (1, 2, 3, ...) as an instant in time (namely, the stroke of midnight on a particular New Year's eve). So the "1" represents midnight December 31, 1 AD, and the actual 365-day period historians call 1 AD is the piece of number line that lies between the "0" and the "1". (I call the piece of number line "1 AD" because that's what historians call the first year of the new age. They COULD have chosen to call it "0 AD", but they didn't, and that set us up for the calendar wars raging today...) 0---1---2---3--> A===B In the arcane diagram above: A is Midnight Dec 31, 1 BC B is Midnight Dec 31, 1 AD === is the year 1 AD The year 1 AD ends just as you reach the "1" on the number line. This is the end of the "first year AD". If you extend the line, you'll see that the year 10 AD ends just as you reach the "10". This marks the end of the "first decade AD" (that is, the end of the first 10-year period following the zero). It should be pretty easy to see that the analogy holds for the first century (which ends at the end of 100 AD), the first millenium (ending at the end of 1000 AD), and the second millenium (ending December 31, 2000 AD). Therefore, under the standard system, the third millenium and the 21st century begin January 1, 2001. I hope this makes as much sense to you, gentle reader, as it does to me, but it really doesn't matter much. My Y2K-non-compliant software will STILL be blowing up on Jan 1, 2000 no matter how I try to reason with it. Now that's off my chest. I counting on your flames to keep my place warm as we begin this one-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-ninth year... :-)