universal time

American  

noun

1. (often initial capital letters) Greenwich Time. UT

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universal time British  

noun

1.  UT.  (from 1928) name adopted internationally for Greenwich Mean Time (measured from Greenwich midnight), now split into several slightly different scales, one of which (UT1) is used by astronomers

2.  UTC.  Also called: universal coordinated time.  An internationally agreed system for civil timekeeping introduced in 1960 and redefined in 1972 as an atomic timescale. Available from broadcast signals, it has a second equal to the International Atomic Time (TAI) second, the difference between UTC and TAI being an integral number of seconds with leap seconds inserted when necessary to keep it within 0.9 seconds of UT1

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universal time Scientific  

1. The mean time for the meridian at Greenwich, England (0° longitude), which runs through the former site of the Royal Observatory. It is based on the sidereal period of Earth's rotation and is used as a basis for calculating standard clock time throughout most of the world.

2. Also called Greenwich Mean Time

3. Compare coordinated universal time

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universal time Cultural  

1. The measure of time obtained from the rotation of the Earth, also known as Greenwich mean time, after the Greenwich Observatory in England. The world's time standard today is Coordinated Universal Time, which is kept by atomic clocks. The two universal times are kept in synchronization by the occasional insertion of leap seconds into the year.

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Etymology

Origin of universal time

First recorded in 1885–90

Example Sentences

Spring cleaning has become a universal time to declutter our lives, chucking everything we no longer need.

From Salon

Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set.

From Scientific American

While there’s no universal time frame for how long you should text someone before scheduling a first date, Hoffman suggests one week.

From Los Angeles Times

But without leap seconds, what happens to coordinated universal time?

From The Verge

Holt, who died in 2014, once said that the alignment, which commemorates the day on which William Henry Ross purchased the land that would become Rosslyn, integrates “historical time” with “cyclical, universal time.”

From Washington Post