Referencing decades in two-digit form fell out of favour with the Y2K issue. Perhaps it should be resurrected.
At the turn of the 20th century, fashion was to refer to "oh-eight" and such, IIRC. I don't know that the decade had a common nomenclature. I suspect there's a Wikipedia article on that somewhere....
We're just starting the 20s. I don't think I ever heard of the decade from 1910 to 1919 being referred to as the 10s, but I definitely heard of the 20s. Maybe the first 20 years of a century are kind of hard to name, so, yeah it's about time.
In English, verbal reference to "1999" was "nineteen ninty-nine". But "2000" was "two thousand" rather than "twenty-aught" or "twenty-oh-oh".
There's an interesting aside here, the ephochal 1968 science fiction film classic Stanley Kubrick / Arthur C. Clarke collaboration 2001: A Space Odyssey was conceived as "twenty-oh-one" as I recall,[1] but came to be referred to largely as "two thousand and one". Whether this was simply due to the same psychological / verbal awkwardness of "twenty oh-one" or itself shaped subsequent usage I'm not sure.
I do note that the years in the span 2000--2009 are typically referred to in my experience as "two thousand one ... two thousand nine", but from 2010 onwards, the pattern is far more typically "twwenty ten", "twenty eleven", ... "twenty twenty-two", etc. There seems to be a similar pattern for the span between the years 999 and 1010 at least that I'm aware: "nine ninety-nine", "one thousand", "one thousand one", ... "one thousand nine", "ten ten", "ten eleven", ...
If I can nerd-snipe anyone into tracing what usage, patterns, history, and psychology of millennial-decade-span verbal year references are and why ... well, I'm sorry, I guess?[2]
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Notes:
1. I'm pretty certain Clarke references this in his many essays. Probably in The Lost Worlds of 2001
2. My first nerd-sniping target is of course myself... Some easily-found results:
- NPR dedicated a story to the pronunciation of "2010" ... and reaches no conclusion, though it comes up with another cultural reference, "In the Year Twenty-Five Twenty-Five", in addition to my suggestion of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And an ominous reference to "the year we'll all be talking about: 2020"...: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120470...
- Wikipedia seems to suggest that the 0--9 years of millennial centuries (1000, 2000, 3000, etc.) are pronounced as n* thousand, followed by the "twenty", "thrity", "forty"... followed by years after the year 10 of those millennial centuries, though without citation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_numerals#Dates
I'm not sure what AP, Chicago, or MLA style guides suggest.
Referencing decades in two-digit form fell out of favour with the Y2K issue. Perhaps it should be resurrected.
At the turn of the 20th century, fashion was to refer to "oh-eight" and such, IIRC. I don't know that the decade had a common nomenclature. I suspect there's a Wikipedia article on that somewhere....
Hrm ... not really, or at least not readily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade