If you have read an old book or a classic you would have come across the abbreviations A.D and B.C at some point. Well, if you don’t know what it means, you have come to the right place.
So what are the full forms? What do A.D and B.C mean? The full form of A.D is Anno Domini which is a Latin word and means “In the year of our Lord”. This era was the era in which Jesus Christ was alive.
And B.C stands for “Before Christ” which is the era in which Jesus was not even alive, he wasn’t born yet.
For example-
225 B.C is 225 years before Jesus was born.
And 122 A.D is 122 years after Jesus was born.
Think of time as a number line, the years in B.C are the negative numbers and the years in A.D are the positive numbers.
So did a Year Zero exist?
The year Zero did not exist in the Anno Domini (AD) system commonly known as the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a widely accepted calendar with 12 months of 28–31 days each. According to this calendar, a year consists of 365 days, and in certain years known as leap years, an extra day is added to February. Modern calendar years have 365 days, and a complete revolution of the earth around the Sun takes approximately 365 days and 6 hours. Every four years, an extra 24 hours accumulate thus requiring that an extra calendar day be added.
If you want to know if a year is a Leap year just check if it is exactly divisible by 4. (such as 2016, 2020, 2024, etc)