Millennium (ky)

CalendarCurrent unit

One thousand years.

1 millennium = 31,556,952,000 seconds (exactly).

About the millennium

Latin supplied the parts of millennium: mille, a thousand, and annus, a year. The plural can be millennia or millenniums. Because a thousand years exceeds any one person's reach, the word acquired religious overtones in the idea of millenarianism, though the unit itself is a plain count of years. When the year 2000 arrived, a new question came with it: was this the start of the third millennium, or was that a year away?

A millennium is 1,000 years, here 1,000 average Gregorian years. The 2001 camp points out that there is no year zero, so the first millennium ran from year 1 to year 1000. The 2000 camp followed the odometer effect, in which the hundreds and thousands digits roll over together. Most people celebrated in 2000, and the celebrations in 2001 were mostly routine, although the U.S. Naval Observatory, Cuba and Japan did mark the strict date. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould observed that the strict view dominated at the start of the 20th century and the popular view at its end.

Sources: Wikipedia: Millennium; Wikipedia: Millenarianism

Millennium conversion chart

1 millennium expressed in every other time unit:

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