UTC
n. uncountablen. Stands for Coordinated Universal Time. The primary time standard used by the world to regulate clocks and time. It is the same everywhere on Earth and does not change for summer or winter.
n. Abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time. The primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time, based on high-precision atomic clocks and adjusted for Earth's rotation. It serves as the successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for scientific and legal purposes.
The flight departs at 14:00 UTC.
International legal contracts often specify a deadline in UTC to avoid confusion between parties in different time zones.
While UTC is effectively synonymous with GMT in casual conversation, it is technically a more precise standard that incorporates leap seconds to account for irregularities in the Earth's orbital velocity.
A compromise initialism between English CUT (“Coordinated Universal Time”) and French TUC (“Temps Universel Coordonné”), unofficially giving “Universal Time Coordinated” and “Universel Temps Coordonné”.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Usually used without an article ('at 12:00 UTC') or with 'the' when referring to the standard itself ('the UTC standard').
Last updated May 10, 2026