- published: 04 Dec 2013
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The 2000s (pronounced "two-thousands") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 2000 and ended on December 31, 2009.
The growth of the Internet contributed to globalization during the decade, which allowed faster communication among people around the world.
The economic growth of the 2000s had considerable social, environmental and mass extinction consequences, raised demand for diminishing energy resources, and was still shown to be vulnerable as demonstrated during the Global Financial Crisis late in the decade.
In the English-speaking world, a name for the decade was never universally accepted in the same manner as for decades such as the '80s, the '90s, etc.
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". On January 1, 2000, the BBC listed the noughties (derived from "nought" a word used for zero in many English-speaking countries), as a potential moniker for the new decade. This has become a common name for the decade in the UK and Australia, as well as other Anglospheric countries.
2000 (MM) was a century leap year starting on Saturday (dominical letter BA) of the Gregorian calendar, the 2000th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 1000th and last year of the 2nd millennium, the 100th and last year of the 20th century, and the 1st year of the 2000s decade.
2000 was designated as:
Popular culture holds the year 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium due to a tendency of grouping the years according to decimal values, as if year zero were counted. According to the Gregorian Calendar, these distinctions fall to the year 2001 because the 1st century was retroactively said to start with year AD 1. Since the calendar does not have year zero, its first millennium spanned from years 1 to 1000 inclusively and its second millennium from years 1001 to 2000 (See more at Millennium).
The year 2000 is sometimes abbreviated as "Y2K" (the "Y" stands for "year", and the "K" stands for "kilo" which means "thousand"). The year 2000 was the subject of Y2K concerns, which are fears that computers would not shift from 1999 to 2000 correctly. However, by the end of 1999, many companies had already converted to new, or upgraded, existing software. Some even obtained Y2K certification. As a result of massive effort, relatively few problems occurred.